Bathrooms: Flooring - part 1

When we installed the underfloor heating system upstairs, the original intention had been to use engineered wood flooring throughout the first floor, including the bathrooms. We were assured by several suppliers that engineered wood was perfectly suitable for use in bathrooms, however further investigation revealed that wasn't entirely true... there were several crucial caveats that the suppliers neglected to mention, such as the fact that it was fine to use in bathrooms, so long as you didn't get it wet!

(Pictured below - the dry screed in the en-suite bathroom needed some patching up after being walked on for almost 2 years!)

So having decided to tile the floors instead, we now had the headache of how to tile over the dry screed and batten flooring that had been designed to support engineered wood... we certainly couldn't tile directly onto the screed, but what was the best way to ensure that the tiles don't crack and buckle in the future?

It seemed nobody really knew; getting advice from local tilers revealed half of them didn't have a clue and the rest didn't really care (so long as they got paid). One tiler even tested the structural suitability of the floor, by jumping up and down on it repeatedly - a scientific approach that yielded a "yeah, I reckon that'll be alright"... hmm.

One simple solution was to lay thick plywood down as a base for the tiles, but that would inhibit the underfloor heating, plus it would raise the finished floor height too much. More research suggested that a thin cement board might work and after discussing it at length on various building forums, we finally had a plan.  

The first step was to clean up the existing screed. We hadn't been able to get a shower tray in exactly the size we wanted, so that meant there was a small gap that needed filling.

Several battens screwed in place provided a gap-filler that matched the height of the rest of the floor.

Cement board should provide enough stability to use as the first layer of our tile base and at only 6mm thick will not raise the height of the flooring too much.

It does contain some nasty stuff - the manufacturers recommend you do not cut it with any power tools, but score and snap it instead so as to reduce the amount of airborne particles.

As ever, Alan did scale drawings of the bathrooms to work out the best way of cutting the boards with minimal wastage. Money is tight so we have to be very careful not to over-order materials. 

Once the boards were cut, we could lay them out and make sure they all fitted as planned.

The next problem was how to safely screw the sheets down. Our underfloor heating pipes are hidden in the screed directly below and puncturing one of those would be an absolute disaster. To avoid this, we drew the location of each batten onto the cement board in marker pen, so we knew exactly where it was (or wasn't) safe to fasten a screw. 

Water pipes run through small gaps in the battens, so it was absolutely crucial that we didn't make any mistakes when marking out.

Same process in the main bathroom. The boards were cut according to our plan and dry-fitted.

Once again, we painstakingly drew in the location of all the battens.

The next stage was to prime all the floors so that the adhesive would grip to the dry screed properly. We took up all the loosely-fitted cement boards and brushed on several layers of a special acrylic primer.

The first coat of primer drying. The second coat has to be brushed on in an adjacent direction.

Same process in the en-suite.

The primer immediately made those dusty cement floors seem so much more clean and solid. 

Once the second coat of primer had fully dried, we were ready to start fitting the cement board. We laid down flexible tile adhesive with a notched trowel. The boards are secured primarily with screws, so the adhesive acts more as a 'filler' to help level any unevenness in the screed. 

Next we laid down each cement board in turn and screwed them into place. It was nerve-wracking driving in the screws - once the adhesive was down, the battens were completely hidden so we were relying entirely on our markings to avoid hitting those pipes...

Once the boards were screwed down, we taped across all the joints using a specialist mesh tape...

... then more adhesive was pushed through the mesh and embedded into all the joints...

... and finally the adhesive was feathered out using a trowel

With the en-suite completed, we moved on to the main bathroom. 

Taping the joints.

Laying adhesive into the joints and smoothing out the joints.

What a relief. The cement boards were laid in both bathrooms and we'd managed to avoid screwing into any of the heating pipes. Stage one of the bathroom flooring was completed, but there was still a long way to go before we could start tiling.   

Painting: walls - hall, stairwell and landing

With a lot of dusty work still going on in the house, we hadn't planned on painting the walls until much later, but our new staircase would be arriving (relatively) soon so it made sense to get the stairwell area painted before that was fitted. 

Once the stairs are in, it will be much harder to reach the upper areas of the walls, plus the cut-string design of the staircase meant painting around it could be very tricky. And since we would be painting the stairwell, we decided to paint the hall and landing at the same time.      

We spent some time choosing the type and colour of paint we would be using and eventually decided on Little Greene's 'French Grey'. Since the hall and landing would be high traffic areas, we chose to use their 'Intelligent Matt', a flat matt finish that claims to be hard-wearing and scrubbable. 

We haven't used any coving in the house, which was going to make it harder when painting the corners where the wall meets the ceiling. Getting a perfectly straight line using a brush would take us far too long, so we decided to try out one of these paint edgers. They do take a bit of practice to get right, but once you've figured out how much paint to load and how hard to press, the results were pretty good and certainly much quicker than painting by hand. 

Speed is quite important when cutting-in, because you are trying to maintain 'wet edges' to avoid any visible sheen lines that can occur where the brushed edges and rolled walls meet.     

Although the whole house had already been painted with an undercoat of white emulsion, there was still plenty of preparation needed. The lights, sockets and switches all had to be removed, any small nicks or bumps filled and the walls all lightly-sanded and cleaned down. 

Here's the upstairs landing prepped ready for the first coat of French Grey...

... and here it is after the first coat. We were impressed with the quality and consistency of the Little Greene paint, which seemed much better than other 'posh paints' we'd used in the past.

Painting the high edges at the top of the stairwell was a bit hair-raising, but would have been far more difficult once the stairs are in.  

Although slightly darker than the stark, all-white look of the undercoat, the grey paint seemed to reveal lots of shadows and contrasts that gave the rooms a much warmer character.

All the work we put in finishing the walls seemed to pay off; the joins between the Fermacell boards seemed hidden and the walls looked as smooth as if they'd been plastered. Perhaps all those many, many hours grappling with Fermacell instead of getting in a plasterer had proved worthwhile after all? (Or perhaps not - more on that later...) 

Once the second coat of paint had fully dried, we could refit all the sockets, switches and lights.

While the rollers and brushes were still wet, we decided to paint the utility room too.   

More prep required; switches and sockets were undone and pulled away from the wall (just enough to allow a mini-roller behind) then any unevenness in the undercoated walls (such as paint drips) were removed by gently sanding everything down. This was much easier and quicker using a large hand-sander.

Before.

After.

Before.

After. 

This paint is not cheap so we saved a bit of money by not painting any areas that would be covered by kitchen cabinets. 

Once the paint had dried and all the wall lights had been refitted, an unexpected problem cropped up. 

Everything had seemed perfect in daylight; the walls looked and felt absolutely smooth, however that all changed at night... 

That same wall in the evening showed loads of horizontal shadows above and below the light. At first we thought it was just the light fitting creating the lines, but after much investigation it turned out that it was actually a manufacturing fault with the Fermacell boards. (Noooooo!)

As part of the production process the Fermacell boards are sanded down, however sometimes the sanding drum can bounce and that causes these 'ladder lines' to be created. They are completely invisible during the day, so of course we never noticed them.  

And the next question was, how many other boards had been affected... ? 

... the answer was pretty much every single board in the house had the same ladder lines! (Noooo again!). We had been sold a batch of boards that frankly should have been chucked in the skip. Even worse, we had spent months carrying, cutting, fitting, shaping, jointing and smoothing them, only to find that once illuminated with wall-lights they were all showing these dreadful 'ladder lines'. We were not happy. 

Looking up at the light above the stairwell - the photograph doesn't show the ladder lines...

... but the same light photographed from the landing shows the extent of the ladder lines. 

We went around shining a wander lead across all the walls in the house and there were ladder lines everywhere. It was so depressing.

Fermacell to their credit did (sort of) try to help. 

Their offer to supply us with new boards was no use because we weren't about to rip down all the boards we had spent months fitting. We then suggested they send over some of their expert fitters to put it right (i.e., effectively plaster over all the boards - boards that ironically are sold as specifically not-needing plastering) but they didn't seem too keen on that, suggesting that their fitters only did commercial properties, not domestic.  

Ultimately, after six months of teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling (and almost daily phone calls to Fermacell), we did finally reach an agreement for compensation. We really didn't want the money; we'd rather someone had just come and put it right, because we still had the headache of trying to work out exactly how we were going to fix this mess...