ARE GUTTER GUARDS WORTH THE COST?
I’m about to tackle a ceramic tile floor project. After doing some research, I’m quite confused about how to prevent cracks in the tile. I already know that my existing floor has some slight humps and low spots. What would you do to ensure the floor tile is crack-free for a long time?
I applaud your ambition and the fact that you took the time to research the project before you got started! Several hours of each day I do autopsies on homeowner failures that tumble into my email box. The common cause of these snafus is the lack of knowing what to do before starting a project. Most homeowners dive in, start to flail and just hope things will work out.
Ceramic tile is a great product, but it’s weak if you try to bend it. It will crack. The tile will bend or crack if you step on it where there’s a tiny void space under it. You can eliminate these void spaces by installing the tile on a perfectly flat surface.
Note that flat doesn’t always mean the floor is level. Flat means the surface has no dips or humps in it. You can locate dips or shallow depressions in a floor using a long straightedge and a flashlight. Shine the light at a low angle to see if you see light beams passing under the straightedge.
You can save yourself lots of trouble and time by using amazing self-leveling floor compounds. These are powdered products you mix with water to the consistency of a thin soup. Gravity allows the liquid compound to flow across the floor much like water might in a flood.
When the compounds set up and get hard, they create a perfectly flat surface that happens to be level too.
They’re a perfect substrate for ceramic tile. Professionals use these compounds frequently because they don’t want to have to come back to fix cracked tile. The compounds are not hard to work with, but they do require some moderate skill.
I assembled a handful of useful tips, sources of the floor leveling compounds, and some great how-to videos showing how to get your floor flat. To discover all this great free information, go to go.askthebuilder.com/floorleveling.