Bathroom tiling in Becontree, Barking. Walls and floors tiled on a prepared, waterproofed base with the setting out planned for a small room.
Becontree is one of the largest council-built estates in the country, and its bathrooms share a shape: small, often with a window on one wall and the door opening into the space. That leaves very little room for error in the setting out, because every wall is visible from the doorway.
The preparation is the same as anywhere but matters more in a small room. Behind a shower there needs to be a board that can take water, taped at the joints and carried up past the head. The original walls in these houses are usually sound, but decades of patching mean they are rarely flat, and a flat wall is what a tile needs.
Floors are frequently timber and need an overlay or a membrane so movement does not come through the tiles. The bathroom in a Becontree house often sits over a kitchen, which is why it is worth doing the floor properly rather than quickly.
Then it is layout: larger tiles with fewer joints make a small bathroom read bigger, the cuts go behind the door and under the bath line, and the pattern is set from whatever you see when you walk in. Tiles that sound hollow when tapped, grout cracking in the same line twice, or a floor that gives underfoot are worth looking at before anything new goes over them.
Send a photo or a quick video of the room on WhatsApp, or get a free fixed quote, no obligation, and we’ll tell you straight what it needs.
Decades of patching leave walls out of true, and tiles show it immediately.
Boarded and taped, carried above the shower head.
Overlay or membrane over timber so movement does not crack the tiles - and so the kitchen ceiling below stays dry.
Fewer joints, cuts hidden behind the door and under the bath line.
Bath to wall, wall to floor and the internal corners.
Sheeted, swept and the room left usable wherever possible.
Two to three days of tiling, then 24 hours after grout and silicone.
Sometimes, if they are well stuck and flat. In a small room the extra thickness matters, so we will tell you when taking them off is the better call.
We tile around them. It is worth booking the plumbing and the tiling in the right order so nothing has to come off again.
Medium to large, generally - fewer grout lines make the room feel bigger and are easier to keep clean.
It gets taken back to a sound surface. Tiling over ridges of old adhesive is how you end up with a wall that is never flat.
Becontree, Gascoigne, Upney, Longbridge and the rest of Barking.