12 Top Tips for Tiling a Bathroom

Want to save some pennies work on some home improvement projects yourself, such as renovating your bathroom? It’s well worth thinking about taking on the tiling project yourself. Even a novice can do it. The important things to remember are: planning and preparation.

Careful planning when it comes to tile layout is key during a bathroom renovation project. Planning the layout of tiles, right from the very beginning, can really help with everything, including fixture locations, lighting locations, framing changes and niche locations. If you don’t plan, you most likely won’t get what you were looking for.

1.) Determine How Many Tiles You’ll Need

First up, you need to work out the number of tiles required for the bathroom in question (make sure you allow for excess ‘wastage’, i.e. breakages and cuts). Normally, tile suppliers provide guides on their websites when it comes to how many square metres of wall each pack of tiles can cover. So, pair your requirements with this, then allow for an additional 10% to include wastage and spares.

2.) Prepare the Walls

Have you prepared new walls properly for tiling? If not, you may need to score plaster with your notch trowel to make a decent ‘key’ for the adhesive to stick to. For existing walls, some corrective work may be required to make sure the base is level for the adhesive tiles. If you’re not too sure about how to prepare walls for tiling, consider taking an Ntiling course which is perfect if you want to undertake hands-on tiling training and learn about the trade from scratch.

3.) Make a Gauging Stick

To identify where you need to place your tiles, begin by making a gauging stick. Find a length of timber and lay it on the floor. Position a tile along it lengthways, level with one end of the stick, and mark the timber where this tile ends.

4.) Size Matters

Size matters and tiling is no exception! Using larger tiles can enhance the size of a bathroom – the bigger, the better, except when they need to be cut down to fit around corners or in between fittings. The reason larger tiles make a bathroom look bigger is that there are fewer grout joints which reduce the number of lines.

5.) Tile Style

What can have a real bearing on the perceived space in a bathroom is the colour and style of the tile. Light colours can make a room look bigger, which is much the same for tiles. Light-coloured tiles like cream or white can enhance the size of a bathroom, as these colours reflect more light than darker coloured tiles which, in turn, brings more light and space to the room. It’s fine to incorporate some darker tiles into the design, but just make sure you have at least half of the tiles in a lighter colour, so you can still improve the perception of space.

6.) Gloss Tiles

To achieve the effect of a bigger bathroom, gloss tiles can really work wonders. Because the light bounces off the tiles and around the room, the space is increased. The only downside of gloss tiles is that they need to be cleaned more often than matt tiles. But cleaning is very easy – so don’t worry too much.

7.) Mosaic Tiles

Did you know mosaic tiling can make a bathroom look larger? This is because they keep the viewer’s eyes moving, tricking them into believing there’s a lot more space than there actually is. You could even try some mosaic borders.

8.) Bathroom Flooring Tiles

If you want the floor to appear as one big tile, you can plump for unified tiling, which achieves this effect. What it also does is make the surroundings look more prominent, therefore making the room appear bigger. All you need to do is choose large tiles and grouting that’s a similar colour to the tiles, remembering to position the tiles close together.

9.) Use the Same Colour Tiles for the Floor and Wall

By using the same coloured wall and floor tiles as well as similar coloured grouting, this really helps make your bathroom look as if it’s larger than it really is.

10.) Carefully Place Tiles

Remember the saying that wearing vertical stripes makes you look slimmer? The same notion applies to tiles – the human eye will follow the tile line, giving the effect the room is bigger. If you have a narrow bathroom, position the tiles so they’re in lines perpendicular to the longest lines. Your eye will look at the back of the room instead of the side.

11.) Lay Your Tiles Properly

The key here is to position your tiles in the right way so they give the effect of enhancing the space. So, lay your tiles diagonally which will trick your primitive brain into believing there’s loads more space than there actually is - your eyes fix on the diagonal points. Clever, right?

12.) Make Your Ceiling Look Taller

If your bathroom has a low ceiling, you can make your ceiling appear higher by piling rectangular tiles vertically on top of each other. By doing this, your eyes are drawn to the vertical lines that reach up to the ceiling which, in turn, accentuates the height of the wall.