Hopefully you experts can help me out. We have a plumber booked and our friend is a plasterer/decorator and has done a lot of standard domestic tiling (he did a great job of all our other tiles but he’s never come across the cement tiles we have bought, and I want to be specific about how we fit them!)
We’re doing a total refit of our bathroom, starting from scratch, and will mostly be tiling in easy metro tiles, but one wall (along the length of the bath) will have three rows of Mexican encaustic cement tiles instead.
They’re 20x20cm and 16mm thick and each weigh 1.4kg.
Here’s the link to the retailer’s advice re sealing/fitting etc:
http://besttile.ie/Cement-Tile-Fitting- ... aintenance
The tiles will be fitted along an external brick wall, under a window and on top of the bath, and so far my questions are:
So we’ll strip off all old tiles and remove all plasterboard/paint/skim or whatever we find on this wall...because regular plasterboard or plaster skim won’t take the weight of these tiles, yes?
Do we then use sand/cement render to make good the wall we’ve just wrecked? Do we tile straight onto the render??
Or do we use something like Hardiebacker? How is it attached to an external brick wall? Do we use it all the way up that wall even though we’re only using 3 rows of tiles?
When do we use the primer (like BAL APD)
On top of the render or on top of Hardiebacker stuff?
We know we use a flexible tile adhesive... but which one?
We also know we use a narrow joint and a light grout to avoid cracking and staining and that we seal the cometely clean tiles at least 3 times ...but which grout is best?
What type of notched trowel thing for applying the adhesive to a tile that thick and heavy?
How do we ensure they stick well and safely at that weight??
What do we do about that thickness of tile sitting along the back bath rim...pull the bath out a little and batten behind the bath and tile onto that?? We can’t dig channels into the walls for the bath or we’d have no rim left to surface-mount our central taps with such thick tiles!
(I found this bath advice online:
“Firstly put bath in position, level it, make recesses into wall or walls (as its unlikely to find perfect 90 degree walls). Fix bath into position connecting plumbing and waste, fill up bath with water, check if bath is level again, seal around bath to walls with a good quality silicone, tile on top of bath and seal again after grouting. The double sealing reduces the risk of water leaking”)
Please help, I’m clearly a total amateur who needs help to get my guys to do this unusual job right!
Thanks for reading.