Surrey Cottage: Kitchen Extension Floor

This Surrey cottage had been extended to open the kitchen into the living space, which meant the floor ran across two very different substrates. The existing part of the cottage had its original concrete slab, which by the time we arrived was showing several cracks across its surface. Those cracks had to be dealt with properly before any tiling could begin. Resin was injected along every crack to bind the concrete and prevent further movement, and then an anti-fracture membrane was installed across the full floor area to protect the tile bed from any residual structural movement between the two substrates.
Both the existing cottage floor and the new extension slab were levelled to a common datum before the membrane went down, so the finished floor would be continuous without any step or variation between the old and new building. None of this work is visible in the finished photographs. That is the point.

The tiling itself presented its own set of challenges. The room is not square, which meant the setting out had to be resolved carefully before the first tile went down so the cuts at the perimeter read consistently and the tile grid ran true through the full length of the space. The kitchen units had already been installed before tiling began, which added further constraints to how the tiles had to be worked in around the base of the cabinets. The most demanding area was scribing around the original fireplace. The fireplace base is in natural stone with an irregular profile, and every tile around it had to be cut individually to follow the contour of the stone cleanly without any visible gap at the junction. It is slow, careful work and it shows in the result.
The tile is a grey tumbled-edge porcelain at 600 x 900mm, a format and finish that suits a cottage of this age without trying to modernise it. The tumbled edge gives each tile a slightly softened profile that reads naturally in the space. The floor was finished with epoxy grout rather than standard cement grout throughout. Epoxy grout does not stain, does not absorb moisture and does not change colour over time. The grout joints on this floor will look the same in twenty years as they do today. For a floor that runs through a kitchen and a living space in daily use, that is the right specification. The project was completed in two weeks.