Small or large tiles - what to choose?
While you have not started to decorate the walls, there are always options, what material to prefer. If you have already decided that it will be ceramic tiles, you still have a choice of which type to purchase, what color, you can determine and with the texture. However, if a small floor tile is bought, there will be no way back, except at a loss to buy something else. And now you are laying out the walls with the available material, having managed to finish a very small area in a day. Why? And this is the main disadvantage of small cladding - you spend a lot of time covering the walls.
Whether it's a large tile - cover with adhesive, follow it with a notched trowel, apply to the surface, and now the eighth of a square meter is covered with a ceramic coating. Eight identical actions and wall decoration moved to the next square, a day, if desired, you can easily wall the whole wall. Conveniently? Undoubtedly. However, the larger the area of the tile, the higher its fragility.
Large format tiles - what you need to know?
It would seem that with a rich choice there should not be any difficulty in buying the facing material. However, this is not so, especially if you would like the floor and walls to be decorated with large-format tiles. Unfortunately, today there is no perfect finishing material. Which means various minor at first glance defects. But only at first.
In fact, all the shortcomings of the finishing elements can turn into significant flaws in the lining. For example, if you deviate from the correct form( angles correspond to 90 degrees), the error can reach 2 millimeters, although this is a violation of the old GOST.And this will lead to a curvature of the whole series, as well as the neighboring ones. The same will happen with a violation of the dimensions, whether ceramic tiles are fine for the floor or large for walls.
Ideally, errors in length or width should not exceed 1.5 millimeters, with the difference between the smallest tile length in the batch and the largest should not be greater than 2 millimeters .The thickness of the facing ceramics should not have a difference of more than 0.2 millimeters, and the obliquity, which we mentioned earlier in the example, is permissible within 1.5 millimeters.
Does the tile have a large size advantage?
One of the advantages of large tiles we already mentioned is the high speed of finishing in a relatively short period of time. However, there are other, implicit advantages. In particular, it is known that the smaller the seam, the more complete the lining will look. However, if you have large tiles, it is quite acceptable and fairly wide gaps, they will be less noticeable against the background of solid formats of ceramics. For small cladding this will not work, wide seams will be more noticeable than the elements themselves.
In order to emphasize the beauty of the lining, special rubber spatulas should be used during the grouting of the gaps.
How to be? First of all, try to use crosses for tiles to achieve high quality joints. Especially should adhere to this rule in cases where the standard size of the tiles have significant deviations. With the help of a wide seam, even if not completely smoothen, at least make the error of individual tiles in oblique-angles less noticeable. When covering the walls with small tiles, try to make gaps evenly, selecting the elements as a mosaic.
