Hi everyone

I am going to tile my shower room floor and have never tiled a floor before so any advice would be gladly accepted.

The floor is a concrete floor but has metal ducting, with wooden lids housing the water pipes, what would the advice be for dealing with this.

What is recommended for the toilet, fix the pan to the floor and tile around it, or tile the fllor and fix the pan through the tiles. the existing pan is fitted directly to the floor and the as the shower room was carpeted.

Is there any special sealing that I would need to apply to the tiles and grout.

Thanks in advance

What tiles are you planning to use? Did you intend to have the ducting accessible after the floor is tiled or just tile over it and forget it is there?

Hi Royaloakcarpentry

I would probably use ceramic tiles but am open to suggestions.

The ducting could be permanently covered as I would leave a section un-tiled underneath the cupboard which holds the wash basin.

Ceramic tiles should not need to be sealed. Grout is entirely up to you, whether you seal it or not.

because you have a concrete floor and ducting with timber lid, this constitutes two different floor substrates which needs to be dealt with. There are a few options and no doubt some more that I do not know about.

Securely fix lids to ducting. Over lay the whole floor with Schluter Ditra and tile as per normal.

Securely fix lids to ducting and over lay the whole floor with tile backer board. Tile as normal.

remove lids from ducting, protect pipes and infill to same level as floor. Tile as normal.

If you have plumbing joints in the duct then I would leave it as being accessible. Treat the floor as two substrates. This means you need an expansion joint between duct and concrete floor areas. offers the advantage of being able to gain access to pluming should a joint fail. of course it is mainly how long is a piece of string on this point because you may be able to alter plumbing so the only joints are ones accessible under your units.

Thanks Royaloakcarpentry for the advice

Any suggestions on suppliers of the Ditra?

Do a google search and it will come up with a list of suppliers, then you can weed out the local'ish ones.

The site for Schluter will obviously also be displayed and you can get the technical info on Ditra from that site.