Tile Installation & Repair in Raleigh, NC

What is actually behind the tile

Raleigh has the widest range of housing on our list, and for tile that range produces two genuinely different trades.

Inside the beltline — Oakwood, Five Points, Hayes Barton and the streets around them — and through much of the older ring, original bathrooms were built a way almost nobody builds now.

Mud-set, or float work. Wire mesh fixed over lath or sheathing, then an inch or more of cement mortar floated on and worked flat and plumb, with the tile set into or onto it while it cured. The tile is not stuck to a board. It is part of a solid mass.

That has consequences in every direction.

Why it is worth keeping

Mud-set tile is more durable than almost anything installed since. Those hex mosaic floors and small-format wall tiles in 1920s and 1930s Raleigh bathrooms have been in service for ninety years and a great many of them are still perfectly sound.

There is no modern equivalent that will do that. A thin-set installation on cement board is a good system with a good service life, and it is not a ninety-year system.

So the first honest thing to say about an old Raleigh bathroom is: if the tile is sound, think hard before tearing it out. Replacing sound mud-set work with a modern installation is, in durability terms, a downgrade. It may still be the right decision for other reasons — a bathroom you hate is a bathroom you hate — but it should be a decision rather than an assumption.

Repairing it

Where a mud-set surface is damaged, it can be repaired, and it takes patience.

Cutting in without cracking the field. The bed is a continuous mass, so cutting into it transmits vibration outward. It is done slowly, with the surrounding tiles scored and protected, rather than with an aggressive tool and optimism.

Building back to the same plane. A modern patch has to make up the full thickness of what was removed, not a few millimetres. That means building the bed back rather than buttering a tile and pushing it in.

Matching. Vintage tile is not made. Salvage is sometimes available, hex mosaic in common sizes is sometimes still produced in something close, and a donor tile from a hidden location — inside a vanity, behind a pedestal, under where a cabinet sits — is often the cleanest answer.

We will tell you honestly what a match is going to look like rather than promising invisible.

Cracks in a line

Worth its own note because it comes up in old houses and it is frequently misdiagnosed.

A crack running in a reasonably straight line across a tiled floor, through tiles rather than through grout joints, is almost never damage to the tile. It is movement under the bed: a joist that has deflected, a subfloor that has shifted, or a crack in the bed itself following a weak point.

Repairing the surface over a live crack means it reopens, usually in the same line. The cause is worth understanding first, and where it turns out to be structural, that is not our work and we will say so.

The 1960s to 1980s ring

The neighbourhoods filling in between the beltline and the outer suburbs sit between the two worlds. Some mud-set, some early thin-set, and bathrooms that have usually had one update since they were built.

That middle-period work is frequently where the least durable installations are — the transitional era before modern waterproofing practice settled down. Showers of that vintage are worth checking properly rather than assuming.

North Raleigh and Brier Creek

Modern thin-set tile over cement board or a waterproofing membrane, and the issues are ordinary:

Grout wear in the open field of a wall — cosmetic, and a regrout deals with it.

Corners and floor junctions — which should never have had rigid grout in them in the first place. Those move, grout cracks, and it cracks again however carefully it is replaced. They want a flexible sealant colour-matched to the grout, which is the single most common thing done wrong in a bathroom.

Floors that flex — any deflection under tile cracks tile and grout regardless of the quality of the installation, so the substrate gets checked before anything is bonded to it.

Hollow tiles — tap across a wall with a knuckle. Solid and dead is good; drummy means the bond has gone.

Where we stop

Regrouting, flexible joints, tile replacement, localised repair, backsplashes, floor tile and shower tile where the substrate and waterproofing are being properly prepared are our work.

Shower pan replacement involving the drain, plumbing alterations behind the wall, structural floor repair, and anything requiring a permit are not. You will hear that at the quote rather than halfway through.

Getting a price

Photograph the whole room and a close-up of the damage. For an older bathroom, if a tile is already missing, photograph what is behind it — that single image tells us whether we are dealing with a mortar bed or a modern installation, and it changes everything about the answer.

Raleigh is about half an hour from us, with no travel surcharge.