Tiling bathrooms and kitchen walls
Tiles are an ideal decorating material for they make a room look good for years and require virtually no maintenance. But covering several walls with tiles is a large-scale job which needs a methodical and careful approach if you are to achieve the best results.
The all-in-one look that wall-to-wall tiling can give has to be planned carefully to avoid expensive and time consuming mistakes. How to do this may depend on whether you want to include special patterns in the design, but following certain rules will give a desirable symmetry to the look. One of the hardest tasks will probably be choosing the tiles for there’s a vast array of shapes, sizes and colours available.
Having picked out the ones you want though, don’t buy until you’ve done the planning – for the plans of each wall should tell you whether the pattern will work in the room or would be lost in the cutting or amid the fittings. Plans on paper also give you an instant method of working out how many tiles to buy (counting each cut one as a whole, and adding 2-5% for unintended breakage) including the number which will need to be border (two glazed edges) or mitred (on square or rectangular universal tiles) for the top row of half-tiled walls or external corners.
Buy all the tiles at once, but do check each carton to make sure there’s no variation in the colour (this can occur during the firing of different batches).