Wall tiling

Good tiling is relatively easy if accompanied by careful planning. Estimate the number of tiles you need beforehand and know your design requirements if you are introducing a pattern or border. Then set out your starting point, and plan how to deal with awkward corners or recesses. Take care with spacing and bedding the tiles and clean off excess adhesive and grout as you go.

Protect your eyes with safety glasses or goggles when cutting tiles. Be careful of snapped tile edges because they can cut you. To protect sensitive or dry skin, gloves should be used when applying adhesive or grout (the ready-mixed paste which fills the gaps between adjacent tiles).

Tiles can be stuck to most surfaces with the right preparation. The surface must be flat because tiles reflect light and show up any unevenness.

Surfaces must be clean, dry and stable. Crumbling plaster must be removed and all imperfections and holes made good. Newly plastered walls must be allowed to dry thoroughly for several months.

Flaky, crumbly and absorbent surfaces can be primed with a PVA-based adhesive. Use a building/construction type as directed. Waterproof adhesive should also be used in areas which could become wet.

Old ceramic tiles do not have to be removed: you can tile on top. Check if they are firmly fixed - if not, use a good tile adhesive to stick them into place. Make sure that the joints between the new tiles are not in the same place as the old ones.

You do not have to re-plaster a wall that is either bare brick or taken down to brick level. Use exterior grade ply or plasterboard fixed to the wall to give a clean and flat base surface on which to tile.

Do not attempt to tile over wallpaper. This must be stripped back to plaster first. If tiling over a gloss-painted surface, roughen up the surface with coarse abrasive paper to provide a key to which the adhesive will bond.

The number of tiles needed for plain, uninterrupted wall areas is easy to calculate. Find out the number required for the height and for the width (counting part tiles as whole tiles). Multiply the two together and add a further 10% for breakages.

There can be significant variations between batches of tiles. Always buy the quantity you need in the first place and check that all the boxes are from the same batch.

Window recesses and alcoves should be calculated separately and added on. If you are using patterned tiles as inserts, these must be calculated and deducted from your total figure.

If you want to incorporate patterned or motif tiles, plan their exact positions using graph paper, with each large square representing a tile. Shade in where you want the patterned tiles to fall. Stick with this plan because it may be difficult to change once you have started tiling.

Step 1:
Make a tiling gauge from a length of straight wooden batten (say 1.8m or 2.4m of planed 2 x 1in wood). Mark the spacing of the tiles on it and the separate spacer gaps if used.

Starting at the top of the skirting board, use the tiling gauge to plan your tile rows. If a narrow strip is left at the top, move the bottom row up by half a tile width to give more even margins.

Step 2:
Using a spirit level, mark out the first horizontal row of tiles to be fixed above the floor or skirting boards. This must be one tile height or less above the base level. Nail a thin guide batten along this line so that the tiles can be positioned against it.

Use masonry nails for the guide battens, but do not drive them fully in - then they can be removed easily. Step 3:
Mark a vertical line down the centre of the wall, using a plumb bob and line. Use the gauge stick again to set out the vertical rows on each side of this line.

If the border tiles measure less than half a tile width, move the rows sideways by half a tile. Fix another guide batten against the final vertical line.

Since very few lines or fittings in a house are truly horizontal or vertical, you will probably have to cut 'filler' tiles to fit in odd areas around skirting boards, architrave and corners between walls.