Queenstown · Wānaka · Central Otago
Bathroom tiling
A bathroom fails from the inside out. What you can see was never the hard part.
What is included
Substrate assessment and correction before a single tile is cut — out-of-plane walls and a floor without fall are the two faults that no amount of adhesive hides.
Waterproof membrane to AS/NZS 3740, with bonded corners and the fall to the waste formed in the screed, not in the glue.
Full adhesive coverage, back-buttered where the tile calls for it. A hollow tile under a shower is a tile that will crack.
Movement joints at the perimeter and at every internal corner, to AS 3958.1.
Set-out planned around the sightline from the door — cuts land where nobody looks, full tiles where everybody does.
Silicone, trims and a clean room when we leave. On a build where other trades follow us, we will tell you what is still to come after we go, so nobody is surprised by the state of it at the end.
Why this costs what it costs
We fix the substrate instead of tiling over it
Most quotes assume the walls are straight and the floor falls to the waste. On a real build — a slab poured to a tolerance nobody checked, a wall lined to a deadline — they usually are not. Correcting that is a day nobody else has priced — which is exactly why their number is lower and their job telegraphs every lump in five years.
The membrane is a system, not a coat of paint
Bond breaker at the corners, the right number of coats at the right thickness, the right cure time before anything goes on top. Cure time is a day where nothing visibly happens. Cheap jobs buy that day back and pay for it with the whole bathroom.
We buy time, not just material
A large-format wall is slower to set out than a small one, and a stone floor is slower than porcelain. We price the hours the material actually needs. The alternative is rushing it, and rushed is visible forever.
Jobs like this
Questions
- How long does a bathroom take?
- Roughly a week of preparation — substrate, screed and membrane — then up to two weeks from the first tile to the finished grout. The cure time inside that is fixed: it cannot be compressed, and a quote that compresses it is quoting a different job.
- Do you do the waterproofing as well as the tiling?
- Yes. We prefer to — the membrane and the tile are one system, and splitting them between two trades is where responsibility goes to die when something leaks.
- Can you tile over existing tiles?
- Sometimes, and we will tell you honestly when it is a false economy. It raises the floor, it complicates the door and the waste, and it inherits every fault underneath. In a wet area we almost always recommend against it.