Tile flooring in St. Louis, MO

City kitchens and baths take abuse that wood does not enjoy. A rehabbed two-flat bath, a mudroom off the alley, an entry that opens onto the sidewalk in February: those are tile rooms. Porcelain does not care about water, salt or a dropped cast iron pan, and it lasts decades in a house that has already stood for a century. It also sits well against original brick, old tile wainscot and stained trim found all over South City.

Basements are the other place tile earns its money. On a slab in Holly Hills or Carondelet, tile is unbothered by humidity and can be cleaned up after a bad spring without much drama. In older buildings that still have hex tile in a bathroom, we can usually match the look with new porcelain mosaic instead of chasing salvage, which keeps the character of the room without the hunt or the cost of period material.

Tile is rigid, and rigid floors crack when the structure under them moves. That is the whole story in St. Louis houses, where a hundred-year-old joist system may flex more than modern tile tolerances allow. We check deflection, sister or block joists where it is needed, and put down cement backer board or an uncoupling membrane rather than tiling straight to old plank subfloor. Grout lines that crack a year in are almost always a prep problem, not a tile problem.

Flatness is the other half. Old floors sag toward the center of a room and rise over the bearing walls, and large format tile shows every bit of that as lippage along the edges. We flatten with patch or self-leveler first. Over a basement slab we check moisture and scrape off old adhesive so the mortar bonds to concrete instead of to a layer of dried mastic that lets go in a few years.

Erik measures the rooms, checks the subfloor and the deflection, and talks through layout with you: where the full tiles land, where the cuts fall, and how the pattern meets each doorway. You leave that visit with a written price covering the tile, the setting materials, the prep and the grout. If a room needs structural work, it is in the quote before you sign rather than discovered by the crew on a Tuesday.

The crew tears out the old floor, preps and flattens it, then sets tile to snapped lines so the courses run true to the room. Mortar cures, grout goes in, then caulk at every change of plane. Tile is the slowest floor we install because cure time is not negotiable, and a single bathroom is usually out of service for a few days. We walk the finished room with you before we pack the tools up.