• What Not To Do With Slate Tile Floors

    June 11, 2017 Steven Murphy Comments Off on What Not To Do With Slate Tile Floors

    As with any floor tiling project, you will be ordering boxes of slate tiles in bulk. And as with anything fragile that is ordered in bulk, you will be expecting a percentage of the tiles to be in several broken pieces!

    This is the stark reality of ordering a material that is made solely of rock. There may be some wear and tear in the shipping and handling process (and at home).

    So, it is highly suggested that you order a bit of extra slate tiles to counter for this problem. It is far better to have an excess of tile floors than to come up short, and have to go through the time-wasting process of waiting for another small shipment to arrive to finish the job.

    Watch and you will see–once your boxes of tiles show up, open every one of them up. When you find chipped and cracked pieces, set them aside in an empty box for easy returning.

    And when you are testing out the placement of your floor tiles, you can keep in mind that you should be removing any loose dirt pieces that exist.

    When leaving the loose debris underneath the slate tiles, everything will not be level and everything will be messed up.

    What will also be messed up is if you lay the slate tiles onto a wet floor! It is a definite no-no. Who knows what is going to happen if all that moisture is trapped for so long underneath?

    The entire process of creating a slate tile floor consists of a lot of time and waiting. It is no different in the case of waxing the tiles. If the wax is not fully cured, you just can’t move onto the sealer, yet.

    The wait is well worth it, though. I know I’m not speaking for myself when I say that footprint marks left in the wax are not so nice to look at permanently in slate tiles. I made the mistake myself, and I’ve never been able to get rid of the marks.

    As the next chapter in the “waiting for tiles” saga, you will have to wait for the grouting, too. The average wait time: 24 hours. This way, all of the mortar can settle nicely and dry up well before you grout.

    Ben Dziga can give you some tips on slate tile flooring and all of the basics when you check out his slate tiles blog.

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