Tile Installation & Repair in Garner, NC

Height is the Garner question

Garner has a large stock of 1960s to 1980s ranches and split-levels, and the tile jobs here nearly always come with a question that newer houses do not raise: what is already on the floor, and what happens when you add to it?

Houses of that age have usually been refloored at least once, often twice, without anything being taken up. A typical kitchen floor might be sheet vinyl over vinyl tile over the original subfloor, and each of those layers is a few millimetres.

Add cement backer board and tile on top and you are commonly looking at another inch.

What an inch actually affects

More than people expect, and all of it is cheaper to plan for than to discover.

Interior doors. A door that currently clears the floor by a quarter of an inch will not clear a floor an inch higher. Doors can be taken off and trimmed — that is straightforward — but it needs to be in the plan and the price rather than a surprise on the last day.

Thresholds to other rooms. Where the tiled floor meets carpet, wood or vinyl in the next room, a height difference has to be managed with a transition profile. A small step is fine and can look deliberate. An abrupt inch is a trip hazard.

The dishwasher. This one catches people out regularly. Dishwashers slide in under the worktop with limited clearance. Raise the floor an inch under one and it may no longer come out for servicing without lifting the worktop. In a kitchen, the answer is usually to tile under where the appliance sits at the original level, or to plan the height so the machine still comes out.

The cooker and the fridge. Same principle, less critical, but worth checking.

Skirting and door casings. Casings get undercut so the tile runs beneath them, which looks far better than cutting the tile around them. Skirting may need lifting and refitting.

Whether the old floor comes up

Three questions decide it:

Is it well bonded? A single sheet of vinyl that is thoroughly stuck down over a sound subfloor can sometimes serve as part of the substrate. Anything loose, lifting or cushioned has to go — a compressible layer under tile is a guarantee of cracking.

How many layers are there? Two or three layers of history is generally a signal to take it back rather than add to it.

Is the subfloor sound? Which you cannot know without looking. Kitchens and bathrooms in houses of this age frequently have a soft patch near the dishwasher, under the sink or around the toilet, and covering that with tile is money spent on a floor that is going to fail.

The asbestos question

This belongs here and it deserves a straight answer.

Some resilient floor tiles — particularly nine-inch squares — and the backing paper on some sheet flooring manufactured before the early 1980s contain asbestos. A great deal of Garner housing dates from precisely that period.

Intact material sitting under another floor is not doing anything. Breaking it up, scraping it or sanding it is exactly the activity that would make it a problem.

So the responsible sequence where a house is old enough:

1. Sample and test before any removal. A lab sample is inexpensive and comes back quickly.
2. If it is clear, removal is ordinary work.
3. If it is not, that is specialist abatement for a licensed contractor and we will tell you so plainly.

Sometimes the sensible answer where material tests positive is to leave it undisturbed and build over it, and that is a decision made with a specialist rather than by us.

The rest of the tile work

Bathrooms. Houses of this age frequently have bathrooms that have had one update since they were built. Where tile is sound the useful work is regrouting and — the important part — replacing rigid grout in the corners and at the floor junction with a flexible sealant. Those joints move, and grout there cracks and will keep cracking however carefully it is replaced.

Tap the tiles with a knuckle before deciding anything. Solid and dead means bonded; hollow and drummy means the bond has gone.

Backsplashes. Common in a kitchen refresh. The edges and the outlets are what decide how one looks — cover plates want to sit flat on the tile face, which sometimes means packing the electrical box forward.

Cracked tiles. Replaceable, with matching being the honest caveat. Check for spares before anything else, and a donor tile from inside a vanity or behind an appliance is often the cleanest answer.

Where we stop

Regrouting, flexible joints, tile replacement, backsplashes, floor tile and shower tile with proper substrate preparation are our work. Shower pan replacement involving the drain, plumbing behind a wall, structural floor repair and asbestos removal are not.

Getting a price

Photograph the floor, and take a shot of a doorway showing the gap under the door. Tell us roughly when the house was built and what you think is already down. If a corner of the existing floor is lifting anywhere, a photo of the layers at that edge is worth a paragraph of description.

Garner is about half an hour from us, in the same bracket as most of our list.