This customer already had their bathroom refitted by AWI (see here for full details) and being so pleased with the original work they chose AWI to replace their kitchen floor surface.

This 14m2 tiling job is not as simple as it may seem. 

The main issue is that the kitchen floor spanned across an extension with the original house floor being timber and the new extension floor being concrete.  This means tiling across two different substrates each of which will move (i.e. expand and contract) at different rates. 

If you simply tile across the two fields, the tiles or grout lines will crack no matter what adhesives you may use - this is the case even if the two floors are constructed from similar materials i.e. concrete in the main house and concrete in the extension since they may still move at different rates.

To accommodate this, a movement profile strip was used between the two fields - this is a common practice approach which involces installation of a rubber strip which is bonded to the two separate floors.  This allows the two fields to move independently.  If you look carefully you can see the strip in the pictures of the appliances just in front of the washing machine running across the floor though it is intentionally blended in.

Additional we were asked to install electric under-floor heating and made some repairs to the electrical ring main within the kitchen (the existing wiring was noted to be of the wrong type and dangerous).

From start to finish the job included:

• Appliances removed (and then replaced on completion)
• Removal of the existing floor surface (bonded vinyl in this case)
• Preparation of the sub floors including re-inforcement of the timber floor
• Installation of Warm-up undertile heating system - an electric cable system designed to be run within the tile adhesive - no more cold floors! - see here for more information - please note, these systems are often thought to be expensive to buy and to run - this is not the case
• Floor fully tiled
• Kitchen ring main repairs to a socket which had been run as a spur using inadequate cable