Want to spice up an outdoor patio with some fun tile but don’t know where to start? Learn how to tile over concrete + tips and tricks for a lasting installation!
A concrete substrate(floor) is typically found outside for patios and walkways. Concrete sub straits can also be found inside as well with what’s called a slab on grade house. Which is fancy talk for a house built on a concrete pad. Installing tile over concrete can have different steps depending on if you are installing on an inside application or outside application but can be very similar.
This post will teach you the basics of installing tile over concrete.
Installing tile over concrete
For my project example I will be going over a project I did on the outside of a clients home. You may have read my blog post on modern patterned tile but this post will be about the installation process.
A few things I struggled with on this installation was..
-Exterior application
-Inconstant tile sizes
-Spacer free install
-Tiling of risers
-Intricate profile installation
-Imperfect (exterior concrete) substrate
– Expansion joints need to be honored
During an exterior application of tile, the elements make it challenging to ensure a lasting installation. You need to make sure you are using the appropriate materials for an outdoor install. Each tile you see was slightly different in size so I could not use spacers. Instead I created a grid of our pattern size to keep our grout joints in line and pattern from shifting and drifting. The tiling of risers presented a problem of height and also the installation of desired tile edging profiles the client wanted to use.
we had to ensure flatness of the substrate while also keeping the slope in two different directions of the concrete slab ( away from the house and towards the street). The slab was not flat and had a ton of low spots from poor finishing.
I speak a lot about overcoming challenges. Challenges can help you grow in business and in life as a person. Most of you know I wasn’t always a full-time tile setter. So, this installation was a list of many “firsts” for me. Although the project took me a lot longer I am extremely happy with the installation and grateful to have been able to overcome these challenges to make me a better installer.
I started with tiling the risers (front of the step) and than used the profile to create a boarder to tile inside. In the photo above, I am getting the layout ready to create my grid pattern as mentioned above. I laid out the tiles and measured the distance of the tile + about 1/8 grout joint to get the spacing. The grid significantly decreased the level of difficulty for me and made it a much more straight forward install.
Tiling the riser first allowed us to control a few things. We where able to make the height inconsistencies in the finished concrete more consistent and also gave us a square finished edge to tile inside.
Using a grid opposed to spacers allowed us to stay consistent all the way through the install even without using spacers. The finished product. It came out more amazing then I expected.
Thanks for reading! Go out and do something amazing. xo Schannon (ThatTileChick)