Fantastic Tiles For Your Home From Wickes Diy Stores

Tiles are manufactured pieces of hard-wearing material ranging from ceramic

, metal, stone or even glass. Tiles can be used to cover our roof tops, our floors in our bathrooms and the walls too, although other objects can be covered with tiles, like table tops for example.

Tiles are often used to form wall and floor coverings, and can range from simple square tiles to complex mosaics. Tiles are most often made from ceramic, with a hard glaze finish, but other materials are also commonly used, such as glass, marble, granite, slate, and reformed ceramic slurry, which is cast in a mould and fired.

Roof tiles are designed mainly to keep out rain, and are traditionally made from locally available materials such as clay or slate. Modern materials such as concrete and plastic are also used and some clay tiles have a waterproof glaze. Obviously a large number of shapes of roof tiles have evolved.

The simplest tiles are flat tiles, which are laid overlapping each other in rows. There are also imbrex and tegula tiles, pantiles and roman tiles which are flat in the middle, with a concave curve at one end at a convex curve at the other, to allow interlocking.

Roof tiles are 'hung' from the framework of a roof by fixing them with nails. The tiles are usually hung in parallel rows, with each row overlapping the row below it to exclude rainwater and to cover the nails that hold the row below.

Floor tiles are commonly made of ceramic, porcelain, or stone, although recent technological advances have resulted in glass tiles for floors as well. Ceramic tiles may be painted and glazed. Small mosaic tiles may be laid in various patterns. Floor tiles are typically set into mortar consisting of sand, cement and often a latex additive for extra adhesion. The spaces between the tiles are nowadays filled with sanded or un-sanded floor grout, but traditionally mortar was used.

Natural stone tiles can be beautiful but as a natural product they are less uniform in color and pattern, and require more planning for use and installation. Mass produced stone tiles are uniform in width and length. Granite or marble tiles are sawn on both sides and then polished or finished on the facing up side, so that they have a uniform thickness. Other natural stone tiles such as slate are typically split on the facing up side so that the thickness of the tile varies slightly from one spot on the tile to another and from one tile to another. Variations in tile thickness can be handled by adjusting the amount of mortar under each part of the tile, by using wide grout lines that ramp between different thicknesses, or by using a cold chisel to knock off high spots.

Then there is decorative tile work, which should be distinguished from mosaic, where forms are made of great numbers of tiny irregularly positioned tesserae in a single color, usually of glass or sometimes ceramic.

by: Emma McCann

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