Tiling in Berlin

Tiling gets judged on flatness and setting out, and both are decided before a single tile goes on the wall. A perfectly laid tile on a badly prepared substrate is still a failure — just a tidy-looking one.

My tiling is done by a mate who does nothing else, and that’s deliberate. Tiling looks simple and isn’t, especially at the big formats everyone wants now, in rooms that have been moving for a century.

What’s included

Wall and floor tiling in bathrooms, kitchens, hallways and commercial spaces. Assessing and preparing the substrate, levelling and boarding where it’s needed, tanking the wet areas, setting out, cutting including mitres and cut-outs, fixing, grouting and silicone to the junctions.

Large-format porcelain, standard ceramic, natural stone, mosaic and metro. Underfloor heating mats can go in as part of a tiled floor if you want them, and I do the electrical side myself.

How the job actually runs

1. Assess the substrate. Is it sound, is it flat, will it move, will it take adhesive. Everything else follows from that.
2. Prepare. Level, board, prime. On a floor that’s self-levelling compound or an uncoupling membrane. On a wall it can mean re-boarding the lot.
3. Tank the wet areas. Liquid membrane, taped at internal corners and around pipe penetrations.
4. Set out. This is the craft part. Where the full tiles fall, where the cuts land, and which line your eye follows when you walk in. Set a room out from the wrong corner and you get a sliver of cut tile in the most visible spot in the room.
5. Fix. Notched to suit the format, back-buttered on the big stuff, with the coverage a large tile actually needs.
6. Grout and seal. Then clean off properly — grout haze left to dry is a job in itself.

Berlin walls and floors, realistically

The recurring problem is that Berlin rooms aren’t flat, aren’t square and don’t stay still.

Large-format tiles won’t forgive any of that. A 600 by 1200 porcelain tile can’t follow a bowed wall, it bridges it, and every millimetre of deviation turns into lippage at the joint. On a wall that bows 15mm, the wall has to be made flat first. That’s real work, and any quote that skips it is either assuming a flatness that isn’t there or planning to leave you with a wavy wall.

Floors have their own problem. Timber floors on joists with sand or rubble fill deflect under load, and a rigid tiled finish laid straight onto a floor that moves will crack — grout lines first, then the tiles. Either the floor gets stiffened or you use an uncoupling membrane that lets the substrate move without dragging the tiles with it. Skipping that is the commonest reason a Berlin tiled floor fails.

Lime plaster is the third one. It’s not a reliable base for heavy tiles, and more often than not it wants taking off and replacing with a proper board rather than being tiled over and hoped about.

How long it takes

A standard bathroom, walls and floor, is three to five days of tiling once the substrate is ready — and the prep is often longer than the tiling. A kitchen splashback is usually a day. Large-format work is slower per square metre than small, not faster, because the setting out and the flatness tolerance are both tighter.

Then add drying time between stages. Levelling compound, tanking, adhesive and grout all have their own waiting periods, and rushing any of them is how you get problems six months later.

What moves the price

• Substrate condition. Always the biggest factor, and the one nobody can quote accurately without looking.
• Tile format. Large format wants a flatter base and slower work. Mosaic is slow for the opposite reason — hundreds of small pieces and a lot of edge detail.
• Material. Natural stone needs sealing and is less forgiving to cut. Porcelain is harder on blades than ceramic.
• Cuts and detail. Niches, mitred external corners, cut-outs round pipework and a lot of small returns all eat time.
• Layout. Herringbone and brick bond make more cuts and more waste than a straight stack.
• Room shape. The awkward Berlin bathroom carved out of a hallway is mostly edges, and edges are where the hours go.

Send photos of the room with a tape measure in shot and I can tell you what the substrate is likely to need.