PSA: My bathroom floor tile job is a total mess after the grout dried

Tbh, I tried to retile my small bathroom floor last weekend and it's a disaster. I used a basic white ceramic tile from the hardware store and thought I had the spacing right with those little plastic spacers. Ngl, I rushed the grout mixing and it was way too thick, like paste. After it dried, the lines are all uneven and some tiles feel loose when I step on them. I spent about $180 on materials and now I have to look at this wavy, bumpy floor every morning. I'm scared to pull them up because I might wreck the underlayment. Has anyone fixed a bad tile job without starting completely over from scratch?

3 comments

3 Comments

patricia425d ago

What kind of underlayment is under there, cement board or something else? If the grout is really thick and hard, you might be able to carefully scrape out the worst lines with a grout saw and regrout those spots, but the loose tiles are a bigger problem.

victor805d ago

Honestly if the tiles are already loose, that underlayment is probably shot. I had to pull up a whole bathroom floor last year because the cement board got wet and turned to mush. Tbh you're looking at a full redo, not just spot fixes.

emmap162d ago

Ugh, my buddy tried that exact spot fix on his kitchen floor. He spent a whole weekend scraping out cracked grout and mixing new stuff. Looked okay for like a month. Then more tiles popped loose because the board underneath was totally wrecked from an old leak. He ended up having to rip everything out anyway. Wasted all that time.