For anyone interested, here is the email I sent to our contractor yesterday. I'd say I've been fairly diplomatic.
Xxxxx tried his best to rectify the situation with the tiles over the last two days but I'm afraid we are now left with some big gaps to fill in the architraves. I did manage to stop him before he cut anymore this short and as you can see from the pics we managed to get it right on a couple of them after some guidence regarding how the tiles should be fitted and insisting the wood was cut to the correct length.
1. On the architraves that have been cut too short, we will need joiner to replace these please. I did have a chat to the joiner and even he agreed cutting the architrave to lay the tile was fairly standard practice to create a clean finish nowadays.
2. Where tiles have been removed the adjoining tiles edge has been damaged and quite a few tiles are sitting proud and are trip hazards.
3. Many of the grout lines are different widths and many tiles do not line up correctly as mentioned previously. I have attached one example but there are numerous.
4. The new tile that has been laid by the island has a completely different grout colour, in fact it's the colour grey we were originally expecting based on the colour suggested by porcelnosa for these a tiles (not white), which means the grout has not been mixed following the directions 1 part per 1 litre of water or mixed in a dirty bucket. I'd be interested to know how this was measured? Again not sure what we can do about this other than raking out and regrouting which means damaging the tiles either side even more than they are already. We will have to look at this everyday unfortunately.
I really don't think there is much we can do at this stage short of ripping up and starting again, so we will have to live with this now but as far as we are concerned this is far from perfect and will always be a disappointment in what was meant to be our dream kitchen and living room.
We need to have chat about the £36m2 cost of this job. This is what I was originally quoted by a professional tiler (they certainly do exist, and I think they would be offended if we suggested they were all generalists) not a general tradesman and I'm really sorry to say this but this is not an A1 professional tiling job in our honest opinion. I actually took yesterday off work so I could be close to what was being done, this isn't what I was expecting based on the standard of work from the rest of your team, which has been good.
Please keep this email between us, as I mean no disrespect to xxxx, he's obviously well respected in his field and has done good work for you for many years across a few trades by the sounds of it. For a floor costing over 6 grand we were looking for perfection from a dedicated tradesmen experienced in laying large format tiles and attention to detail we have not seen here. This is what we were paying for.
