Bathroom Tile

Bathroom tile has to manage water, movement, light, and daily wear. We plan the layout so the geometry stays crisp and the wet areas stay watertight long after the install. This page covers the tile side of a bathroom: floors, walls, tub surrounds, wet rooms and detail work. If you’re rebuilding the whole room, start with bathroom renovations. If the shower is the whole job, see shower tile installation.

Bathroom tile renovation versus a full renovation

A lot of bathrooms don’t need to be torn back to the studs. If the fixtures stay where they are and the substrate is sound, a bathroom tile renovation replaces the floor, the walls and the surround while the plumbing stays put. It’s faster and it costs less. The honest caveat is the one we give on every site visit: we don’t know what the old tile is hiding until it comes off. If the subfloor is soft or the shower has been leaking, we’ll show you and talk through the options before going further.

Floors that stay flat and level

A bathroom floor is small, which makes every dip and high spot more obvious, not less. We check flatness before setting and correct it with self-leveller or a mortar bed where needed. Heated floors are built on an uncoupling membrane, with the heating cable set into it, so the tile isn’t bonded directly to a substrate that moves as it warms. Transitions to hallway flooring are planned so the threshold lands level and the grout line at the door is straight. The general approach is the same as our floor tile work; the bathroom just concentrates it.

Walls, tub surrounds, and wet rooms

Wall tile in a bathroom lives or dies on layout. We set out the room so full tiles land where the eye goes, cuts hide at the floor and in corners, and the courses line through from the tub surround to the shower wall. Tub surrounds are waterproofed the same way a shower is, because a tub with a shower head over it is a shower. Wet rooms, where the tub sits inside the tiled zone and the whole floor drains, are built as one continuous waterproofed assembly with a single slope to the drain.

Large-format porcelain on bathroom walls gives that continuous, quiet surface people want now, and it needs the flatness work described on our large-format tile page. Stone walls need their own sealing and setting approach, covered under natural stone.

The details that read as custom

Niches with edges on grout lines. Mitred outside corners on a half wall so there’s no metal trim. A single piece of stone capping the tub deck. Mosaic in the niche back that centres on the shelf. A floor pattern that starts at the door and stays centred to the vanity. None of this is expensive in material. All of it is layout time, and it’s what separates a tiled bathroom from a finished one. See the geometric accent wall in Langley for the kind of layout work we mean.

Materials for a bathroom

Porcelain for floors and most walls: dense, stable, easy to clean, and available in every look from limestone to concrete to marble. Ceramic and handmade tile for walls and niches where texture and colour matter more than hardness. Natural marble and limestone where the design calls for the real thing and the client understands the sealing. Mosaic for shower floors and feature strips. We’ll steer you away from a tile that won’t survive where you want it, and we’ll say so before you buy it.

Coordinating with the rest of the bathroom

Tile sits in the middle of a bathroom schedule. The plumber roughs in before us and sets fixtures after. The electrician runs the heated floor before the membrane goes down. The glass installer measures once the tile is grouted. We’ve done this enough times that the sequence runs without the homeowner having to referee, and we’ll tell you exactly which stage has to be finished before we start.

Across the region

We tile bathrooms from Vancouver and the North Shore to Chilliwack, and the older the house, the more prep it needs. Character homes in Vancouver and North Vancouver need substrate correction. New builds in Surrey and Langley need flatness control for large tile. Condo bathrooms in Burnaby and Richmond need logistics and a membrane that protects the unit below.

Send us photos of the bathroom and the tile you’re considering, and request a quote. We’ll tell you what the room needs before we talk numbers.