M
My dog's called Trevor
Hi all
Interested in views from the trade world about how I should deal with a big floor tiling **** up. Basically I'm wondering how far I should be pushing my builder to put things right. I've had porcelain floor tiles laid dot-and-dab (sorry, you must all be so bored of that topic) over under-floor heating and am now nearing a dispute of whether several grands' worth of back-pedaling is needed to put the job right.
Bit of background on me on this sort of stuff. Not a pro in the building trade but not blowing my trumpet to say I'm pretty handy on most things around the house - basic repairs, medium size building work, plumbing, electrics, tiling, papering, plastering, and servicing the car until the things became so complicated that you don't recognise anything under the bonnet anymore. My missus says I'm a bit of a perfectionist but I just want to get things right as I don't like the idea of being a DIY botch merchant. Not the fastest in the world but I err on the safe side, ask when I don't know, and am prepared to rip it out and go back to the start when I've got it wrong - which as the years and experience go by is pleasingly rare. Big projects (loft conversion, extension, new central heating) I've had people in (time, effort, feeling older these days). I've had guys I've sacked off jobs when I know I could've done it better and guys I've just been blown away by. This is just to set the scene that I am not completely ignorant when talking to builders etc (relevance apparent later) and not prone to knocking tradesmen just for the sake of it.
Background on the mess I'm in now. Job was a kitchen extension - side return and old lean-to plus a few bits in the neighbouring utility room. Floor for old kitchen was and remains suspended timber, new floor to the side and end of this is concrete. Good job from the builder structurally, really good, would have him back but only for building. Part of the job price was laying the electric (loose cable) UFH and tiling the floor.
In December he laid the UFH cable then the tiles dot-and-dab. Looks like UFH absolutely beyond a doubt has to be laid in a bed (no previous personal experience). For the tiling, I have laid three floors - the old kitchen area twice and the utility room once. All three needed a power breaker to get them up. I'm not an expert but I know if getting them up doesn't break them, they weren't laid right. All mine were a sod to get up. I queried dot-and-dab method with the builder. Told me it'd be fine, done-loads-like-this-and-never-had-a-problem, plus floor not level etc. Apparently self-leveling compound wouldn't have been an option (?). Instinctively UFH cables surrounded by air struck me as pretty effective insulation (think secondary glazing, layers of clothes when it's cold) but he had some interesting ideas on hot air rising to the tiles that didn't really fit with my understanding of physics (I have a scientific background). Against better judgement and with time-constraints I was reassured that if there were any problems he would put them right. To be fair, he hasn't deserted yet.
Kitchen was then fitted on the floor - units along three walls with and an island. Stone work surfaces on top. Wasn't crazy money but far from the cheaper end of the market (that's my missus).
Floor was basically alright to begin with except that it sounded like walking on a xylophone with the different note of each tile with a void underneath. Then a tile started to knock when you stepped on where a dot was coming loose underneath, then another did it and so on.
To his credit he came round to look at it. I managed to dissuade him from his plan of drilling small holes around the edges of tiles and squirting in expanding foam to fill the void and adhere the tile. For me the insulation properties of the foam seemed a bad plan for UFH, and I wasn't convinced it would work anyway and managed to dissuade him on the lines of the possibility of hitting an UFH cable.
After some chats we agreed to try and get up some of the loose tiles. I offered to do that with him. After taking up a few it was apparent that it was only the grout keeping the tiles there. After cutting through the grout each tile lifted easily. Hardly a blob of adhesive has been left on the back of any tile - they look straight out of the shop (turns out he's not sure for certain what adhesive he used).
We just did a couple to start and I indulged him in his experiment to lay one by filing the void with expanding foam with Gripfill on the remaining adhesive dobs. Great experiment. It holds pretty well (but still sounds hollow) but the UFH beautifully heats where the dots are and the rest of the tile stays cold until the heat conducts through the tile. For anyone who lays UFH I'd be happy to chit-chat on some of what I'm seeing that absolutely confirms manufacturers' fitting instructions - except it should all be pretty obvious, it's a bit like bothering actually to test jumping from a plane without a parachute (never formally tested but we all know the result).
We agreed to lift all those that we could without disturbing the kitchen units and did so without damaging the UFH (they come up that easily).
There is/was a plan to remove some of the dots for each tile, leaving a dot at each corner so that a bed of adhesive could be laid in the remaining space but with the dot keeping the level for relaying with Gripfill on top of the old dots to hold the tile at those points. For tiles not lifted because they extend under kitchen units' end panels, they've have expanding foam squirted under (no UFH there) to fill the void, then as much adhesive pushed under as can be achieved, to hold the edge .
Last night after many hours of dissecting dots and dabs away from UFH cable and off the foam insulation tile backer boards stuck to the sub-floor, I started to lose it. In parts of the floor, the insulation is tearing badly and where foam has been squirted under less-accessible tiles, I can't hear a difference when I knock on them. Some of the dots that are due to have Gripfill on them knock against the floor beneath so, presumably lifting the tiles, however easy, is disturbing the adhesion between the sub-floor and the insulation boards. Gripfill on these dots is always going to knock unless by luck it gets held by enough adhesive around it.
This is about where I lost it. None of this is right. I'm looking at hours of work, much of which I have offered to do (not fundamentally opposed to that), in which I have decreasing confidence of an effective, long term outcome, for which I paid and questioned when it was in progress.
That was a long preamble but here is my dilemma. I am increasingly coming to the view that there is no way to get it right than to go back to where things started to go wrong. To do that I can't see a way other than dismantling the installed kitchen, getting the tiles up, leveling the floor (might include grinding off adhesive for the insulation boards), then UFH with insulation, tiling the floor and reinstalling the kitchen. I have suggested this but it is understandably not well received. I have indulged/am still indulging in his suggestions of how to right things but I'm wondering if this is just pissing in the wind.
I do get my builder's reluctance. Shifting the kitchen will need to shift the stone work tops. It's likely these will break (cut for cookers, sink etc). I'd not be surprised that getting back to a floor that can be done properly will cost 2-3 grand for kitchen dis-assembly/assembly, 2 grand for work tops if they can't be saved, couple of hundred for insulation board, and around 700 for UFH cable. I'm not worried on a grand's worth of tiles - they're a doddle to get up as nothing's holding them. I get the costs involved of going right back to get it right but I'm looking at around 25k of units and kitchen machines, in a project that cost around 70-80k. Without fitting (which was in the price), the UFH and tiles come to less than 2k - which bit would I want to save?
What thoughts from the trade? How much more should we try foam, pushing in proper adhesive, prayer, pixie dust? When is it reasonable to draw a line and say that we go back to where the wrong turn was taken, whatever the costs? Who should incur those costs? Am I being unreasonable or unreasonably fussy? Despite the numbers above, I'm not loaded - I took out a mortgage to do this and I'll be paying it forever.
Finally if anyone's got a great idea, I'm all ears.
Thanks if you bothered to read this far
Regards
Matt
Interested in views from the trade world about how I should deal with a big floor tiling **** up. Basically I'm wondering how far I should be pushing my builder to put things right. I've had porcelain floor tiles laid dot-and-dab (sorry, you must all be so bored of that topic) over under-floor heating and am now nearing a dispute of whether several grands' worth of back-pedaling is needed to put the job right.
Bit of background on me on this sort of stuff. Not a pro in the building trade but not blowing my trumpet to say I'm pretty handy on most things around the house - basic repairs, medium size building work, plumbing, electrics, tiling, papering, plastering, and servicing the car until the things became so complicated that you don't recognise anything under the bonnet anymore. My missus says I'm a bit of a perfectionist but I just want to get things right as I don't like the idea of being a DIY botch merchant. Not the fastest in the world but I err on the safe side, ask when I don't know, and am prepared to rip it out and go back to the start when I've got it wrong - which as the years and experience go by is pleasingly rare. Big projects (loft conversion, extension, new central heating) I've had people in (time, effort, feeling older these days). I've had guys I've sacked off jobs when I know I could've done it better and guys I've just been blown away by. This is just to set the scene that I am not completely ignorant when talking to builders etc (relevance apparent later) and not prone to knocking tradesmen just for the sake of it.
Background on the mess I'm in now. Job was a kitchen extension - side return and old lean-to plus a few bits in the neighbouring utility room. Floor for old kitchen was and remains suspended timber, new floor to the side and end of this is concrete. Good job from the builder structurally, really good, would have him back but only for building. Part of the job price was laying the electric (loose cable) UFH and tiling the floor.
In December he laid the UFH cable then the tiles dot-and-dab. Looks like UFH absolutely beyond a doubt has to be laid in a bed (no previous personal experience). For the tiling, I have laid three floors - the old kitchen area twice and the utility room once. All three needed a power breaker to get them up. I'm not an expert but I know if getting them up doesn't break them, they weren't laid right. All mine were a sod to get up. I queried dot-and-dab method with the builder. Told me it'd be fine, done-loads-like-this-and-never-had-a-problem, plus floor not level etc. Apparently self-leveling compound wouldn't have been an option (?). Instinctively UFH cables surrounded by air struck me as pretty effective insulation (think secondary glazing, layers of clothes when it's cold) but he had some interesting ideas on hot air rising to the tiles that didn't really fit with my understanding of physics (I have a scientific background). Against better judgement and with time-constraints I was reassured that if there were any problems he would put them right. To be fair, he hasn't deserted yet.
Kitchen was then fitted on the floor - units along three walls with and an island. Stone work surfaces on top. Wasn't crazy money but far from the cheaper end of the market (that's my missus).
Floor was basically alright to begin with except that it sounded like walking on a xylophone with the different note of each tile with a void underneath. Then a tile started to knock when you stepped on where a dot was coming loose underneath, then another did it and so on.
To his credit he came round to look at it. I managed to dissuade him from his plan of drilling small holes around the edges of tiles and squirting in expanding foam to fill the void and adhere the tile. For me the insulation properties of the foam seemed a bad plan for UFH, and I wasn't convinced it would work anyway and managed to dissuade him on the lines of the possibility of hitting an UFH cable.
After some chats we agreed to try and get up some of the loose tiles. I offered to do that with him. After taking up a few it was apparent that it was only the grout keeping the tiles there. After cutting through the grout each tile lifted easily. Hardly a blob of adhesive has been left on the back of any tile - they look straight out of the shop (turns out he's not sure for certain what adhesive he used).
We just did a couple to start and I indulged him in his experiment to lay one by filing the void with expanding foam with Gripfill on the remaining adhesive dobs. Great experiment. It holds pretty well (but still sounds hollow) but the UFH beautifully heats where the dots are and the rest of the tile stays cold until the heat conducts through the tile. For anyone who lays UFH I'd be happy to chit-chat on some of what I'm seeing that absolutely confirms manufacturers' fitting instructions - except it should all be pretty obvious, it's a bit like bothering actually to test jumping from a plane without a parachute (never formally tested but we all know the result).
We agreed to lift all those that we could without disturbing the kitchen units and did so without damaging the UFH (they come up that easily).
There is/was a plan to remove some of the dots for each tile, leaving a dot at each corner so that a bed of adhesive could be laid in the remaining space but with the dot keeping the level for relaying with Gripfill on top of the old dots to hold the tile at those points. For tiles not lifted because they extend under kitchen units' end panels, they've have expanding foam squirted under (no UFH there) to fill the void, then as much adhesive pushed under as can be achieved, to hold the edge .
Last night after many hours of dissecting dots and dabs away from UFH cable and off the foam insulation tile backer boards stuck to the sub-floor, I started to lose it. In parts of the floor, the insulation is tearing badly and where foam has been squirted under less-accessible tiles, I can't hear a difference when I knock on them. Some of the dots that are due to have Gripfill on them knock against the floor beneath so, presumably lifting the tiles, however easy, is disturbing the adhesion between the sub-floor and the insulation boards. Gripfill on these dots is always going to knock unless by luck it gets held by enough adhesive around it.
This is about where I lost it. None of this is right. I'm looking at hours of work, much of which I have offered to do (not fundamentally opposed to that), in which I have decreasing confidence of an effective, long term outcome, for which I paid and questioned when it was in progress.
That was a long preamble but here is my dilemma. I am increasingly coming to the view that there is no way to get it right than to go back to where things started to go wrong. To do that I can't see a way other than dismantling the installed kitchen, getting the tiles up, leveling the floor (might include grinding off adhesive for the insulation boards), then UFH with insulation, tiling the floor and reinstalling the kitchen. I have suggested this but it is understandably not well received. I have indulged/am still indulging in his suggestions of how to right things but I'm wondering if this is just pissing in the wind.
I do get my builder's reluctance. Shifting the kitchen will need to shift the stone work tops. It's likely these will break (cut for cookers, sink etc). I'd not be surprised that getting back to a floor that can be done properly will cost 2-3 grand for kitchen dis-assembly/assembly, 2 grand for work tops if they can't be saved, couple of hundred for insulation board, and around 700 for UFH cable. I'm not worried on a grand's worth of tiles - they're a doddle to get up as nothing's holding them. I get the costs involved of going right back to get it right but I'm looking at around 25k of units and kitchen machines, in a project that cost around 70-80k. Without fitting (which was in the price), the UFH and tiles come to less than 2k - which bit would I want to save?
What thoughts from the trade? How much more should we try foam, pushing in proper adhesive, prayer, pixie dust? When is it reasonable to draw a line and say that we go back to where the wrong turn was taken, whatever the costs? Who should incur those costs? Am I being unreasonable or unreasonably fussy? Despite the numbers above, I'm not loaded - I took out a mortgage to do this and I'll be paying it forever.
Finally if anyone's got a great idea, I'm all ears.
Thanks if you bothered to read this far
Regards
Matt
