What’s the real cost, and why…
Did you know that the average piece of tile installed in your house has been touched at least five times by the man or woman who installed the tile? That doesn’t even include getting it there and hauled up into your house. Or if you’ve got it at your home, it doesn’t involve hauling it from your garage to wherever it needs to be installed. Let’s look and see all of what goes into installing a piece of tile to get an idea of what you’re paying for it.
You might expect the very first piece that happens is somebody will call a contractor because they need some work done.
That contractor will ask a bunch of questions, ask for some pictures to be emailed or texted to him to look at the job and get a feel for things, and, of course, measurements need to be taken. All that information is brought to the office so that a proposal can be produced and returned to you.
Demo
Usually (almost always,) the first thing to be done is to have the old stuff torn out and hauled away. I can tell you from 44 years of full-time experience that the demo takes as much of the time and energy put into a job as installing the tile itself.
- First, your house needs to be honored and taken care of so that nothing gets banged up or scratched along the way.
- Dust mitigation is always an issue. Even when all the care is taken, you should still expect to find some dust in your house; however, I take as much care in your home as I would in my own – dust is an unavoidable part of the demo process.
- It’s a lot of work to tear out that old tile, fixtures & fittings. It was never installed to be removed. In theory, a tile job could be a once-in-a-lifetime installation. I expect, and you should as well, that the demo will have its own problems. It’s either been done correctly or hasn’t, and the previous installation affects much of the demo.
- Once the tile has been carefully removed from your house, it must be hauled off and discarded. This is very time-consuming. It’s strenuous, hard labor and needs some skillful touch. It’s heavy. It’s clunky. It’s dirty. And quite frankly, it takes an awful lot of manpower to make that stuff go away. Unfortunately, most of the time, because people think this is an unskilled job, they don’t expect to pay much for it. Often, we quote demo on a cost or break-even basis to combat this perception.
Wallboard
- You can’t just remove the tile without destroying the wallboard.
Anything on a tiled wall must be removed entirely – down to the framing. This also includes all of the light switches and outlets. The faceplate needs to come off and be loosened up. Once loosened, it needs to be put back together again. While not hard to do, it takes a lot of time and is usually never charged for. - Now, we need to put some new wallboards in place.
Usually, these surfaces aren’t all that flat, and we also have to check for plum and level. Many guys just put the new wallboard back up and don’t care or aren’t smart enough to figure out that you need to care. To do it right, you need to take some straight edges, look over your walls, and find the 2x4s that are not touching your straight edge, meaning they’re back too far. Then, you need to shim them with different shim-type materials. Eventually, your entire wall will be as flat as possible. This costs money, takes time, and takes skill. Many guys won’t even bother to do this. They’ll bang the wallboard up, and then all the places that are not flat tend to show up when the tile installation is installed unless somebody’s good and they take care of it. You cannot set an excellent tile job on a crappy surface. This is basic tile 101. You have to have a flat surface to have a flat tile job. - Now, we will need to install the appropriate wallboard for the situation.
Once done, all the corners and seams must be taped with tape for tile installations with a thin-set mortar application. All the wallboard needs to be nailed off correctly, meaning one at the edge of both sides of the board and three across the middle.
Planning & Layout
We need to properly lay out the job by getting some of the tiles and laying them on the floor to see where the joints end up. Consideration is given to installing the tile up and down & left and right. Does it have shampoo niches or certain feature elements like a window in the wall, etc? Those neat things must be considered before tile setting can begin. Many do not do this well, and they make tiling mistakes in their layouts. The average homeowner may not notice this, but I can tell you the difference between somebody who’s done the proper planning and somebody who has not. At the end of the day, a job that a skillful person does not do won’t look as sharp and put together.
The Space
Everything has been dropped off, plastic has been put up, and the tile is brought to the workspace. Then you need to have cutting space and mixing space, which is often away from the job space and often up or downstairs, requiring thousands of steps every day up and down the stairs. First, mortar must be made, and then mortar and tiles must be brought to the workspace.
Every time the tile stops on any corner, it requires cuts, meaning hundreds of steps from the job space to the wet saw and then back again. The number of cuts needed during this part of the job is much greater than you could imagine. Each must be individually measured and marked, and they must be right. Even a 16th of an inch is too big or too small, and each cut requires time at the wet saw – wherever it might be.
Certain tiles must be soaked in water for a while before they are installed. That’s another task that takes water and requires heavy steps to carry the buckets to the workspace and even more steps to dispose of the water. If the timing isn’t done correctly with this, you will probably also have problems with your installation.
The Mortar
Once the mortar is made correctly, it must be traveled onto the wall. A proper trial ensures there is enough mortar to attach the tile to the substrate, but not too much mortar or that will also be a problem:
- It’s either not stuck well enough
- It’s so stuck that you’ve got mortar coming through the joints all over the place
Care must be taken to ensure your tile is running level, plum, and straight. If you skip this step, you will have problems. The tile also needs to be installed so it’s flat and smooth, and that doesn’t happen by accident. Even when you have a perfect substrate, it’s not easy because the mortar is hand-mixed, and then you spread it on the wall, requiring a proper skill set.
The back of the tiles must be scratched with mortar, too – like putting butter on your toast. 99% of the failures I see happen because tile installers aren’t doing this. In my mind, contractors who skip this step haven’t done a thing and are stealing from the customer.
Waterproofing & Grout
Waterproofing needs to be done around window openings, soap niches, and on top of bench tops. Not only are the materials expensive, but the process is time-consuming, and you have to throw away some tools simply because the waterproofing will ruin any brush or roller you might use to spread it on the wallboard.
Once dried, it gets grouted. It’s vital that the grout is made with the proper texture and sits in the bucket for a long enough period before you stir it back up. Then, you must hand smear the trowel all over the walls and dry-wash it off before it gets too hard. If you wash it off too quickly, the joints look like a third-grader did them.
One must also ensure that all the joints are uniform in size in both directions. This takes time, of course, and it takes a good eye. And somebody needs to REALLY Care; otherwise, they don’t think of all these things, which will also distract from a tile job feeling sharp, crisp, and clean.
If the grout is dry, you must return and wash the haze off it everywhere. Lastly, if it is a wet area, it needs to be caulked, including all corners, which costs money and, once again, takes time.
The Materials
Let’s talk about materials for just a minute. Since the COVID pandemic, almost everything has gone up at least 200%. Seeing how high and fast some of these materials costs rise is mind-boggling. Sometimes, just a month or two between one purchase and another can increase the price by 40% or 50%.
Tiling the Floors
Tiling floors utilize relatively the same procedure. One thing that is very important to understand is when you walk on a plywood floor, your body weight causes the plywood to sag between each floor joint. The sag might not be much, but any sag is too much. In the trade, we call this flexion. We put a tile-specific underlayment on top of the plywood. It is designed to stiffen up the floor so there is no longer any flexion. If you walk upon a tile installation that moves when you walk on it, guess what? Over time, grout’s going to break up. You’ll see cracks all around the edges of the tile. You’ll soon start seeing some of the tile grout come out. In the worst-case scenario, you’ll see broken tiles here and there, and it could get so bad that there’ll be broken tiles everywhere. So, an underlayment needs to be installed on top of the plywood. It needs to be done correctly, like everything else. Of course, that costs quite a bit of money for the materials, and then you’re also paying for the labor and the knowledge that somebody is doing it correctly.
In Conclusion
I hope I’ve given you a picture of the many required steps for a quality tile installation job. Each step needs to be done right, or you could have problems. At the least, if it’s not done right, it’s just not going to look like you want it to.
If you are in the market for a new car, you can spend $20,000 for a new car or $50,000 for a new one. You don’t expect both cars to perform and be equipped the same. We, as contractors, all expect to be bidding against other contractors, which drives our prices down because we want to price low enough that we get hired and not too high that we get passed over. Low-cost estimates lead to low-quality tile jobs. Please ensure your contractor performs all the necessary steps for a successful tile job. If you want to be 100% sure of the workmanship quality- call us for a free estimate. We won’t be the cheapest, but we’ll be the best!
When considering purchasing a new tile job, please realize that only some people will do the same job I will do for you. I am trying to educate you so you have the right questions to ask your contractor. Tile installation is challenging work. It demands a specific person who’s given to fine detail and isn’t in a rush. That would generally mean they’re not entirely on your property to make money, but they have pride in their work and will do their best. That is a very tedious and time-consuming job when someone’s trying to do it as perfectly as humanly possible.