Saturday, December 10, 2011

Tile Your Own Kitchen Floor By Yourself

By Rosendo Macedonio


Home owners around the world would like to complete home improvement projects but do not know where to start. The majority of folks don't feel confident that they can do these little projects but at the same time, they don't want to pay someone to do it. One of those jobs that shouldn't be that scary is to tile the kitchen floor.

While not very hard to do, you might think that you can make a serious mistake. You can save a lot of capital by doing this yourself. If you understand what to do and what not to do then it should be no problem. When you're prepared, you need to pick the tile you want. You may even be surprised at the options you will be confronted with. You will discover many different styles of tile, having different sizes, colors, textures, materials and finishes. You might even find tiles that have odd sizes, that some companies do on purpose to make you buy more tiles.

Any time you pick a tile, it is usually based on your own personal aesthetics. Once you have it determined, it will be a bit difficult to make switches later. Before you get too far, you need to quantify the area to be tiled, figuring out the best way to run the tile, and how it will work out for waste. Occasionally a different size tile will have more or less waste, for example, depending on the measurements, 6 x 6 inch tile might work out better than 4 x 4 tiles. To make sure you won't spend a ton of money, make sure that you figure out how to minimize tile waste. Since you need to tile around kitchen cabinets, you want to be sure to do it to scale so that you know exactly how many tiles you need. The space beneath the refrigerator also needs to be tiled to provide consistency.

If you can complete basic math, you should be in a position to figure out where to begin and how you should layout your floor. You'll want to begin right, because if you get going crooked, your floor won't look too good. If you sketch two perpendicular lines that are parallel to the walls, you will be fairly safe. You must also have a point in the center so that measurement for the cut sections on the outside wall will be the same. It will not look good when you have a whole tile from one wall and cut tile against the other wall. When you have all this figured out, you can get started placing the tiles.

The adhesive that is necessary will be determined by the type of floor you have, whether it is concrete or wooden sub floor. You are going to need flexible adhesive when laying tile over wood. Once it is all down and has experienced enough time to dry out, you then apply the grout, wipe it down to get rid of the excess, wait for it to dry, and you have a new floor.










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