Victorian Tiling Company Were Tiling
qest craft scholar for Victorian Tiling

Picking up the broken pieces

We have spoken before about other tilers in Glasgow and the differences between us as a Victorian Tiling Restoration Specialist and a normal modern day tiler. So much of it comes down to skill, experience and above all…patience.

If you are getting a new bathroom tiled for example then you might want it tiled. Modern consumerism means you can go to your local large DIY/Hardware/Home Improvements store and purchase a lot of tiles at an affordable price. It means that if one, two or twenty of the tiles break during the fitting – so be it because they are cheap as chips and the tiler can just buy some more knowing that they perfectly match in with what you have.

But when it comes to Victorian Tile Restoration, you aren’t picking up some tiles from the local store. You are taking tiles that have, in some cases not moved from their current position for over one hundred years, removing them, refurbishing any damage and then refitting them. It truly does take care and time to do this because if one breaks beyond salvation, there is not exactly a hardware store that has one hundred year old perfectly matching tiles on aisle 23!!!

So it was a sad day recently when we were called by a Glasgow South Side resident who had brought in a tiler to repair their pantry and the original tiling features.

The Glasgow resident had no idea that these kind of things required a specialist tiler. They just presumed a normal tiler would be able to work on some old tiles.

The tiler in question (who shall remain nameless of course), turned up, quoted a price and began working on the tiled pantry. However it quickly became clear to them that a) this was a difficult job where they couldn’t just ‘jimmy’ off the tiles without them cracking and b) this was going to take more than double the time. Sadly, their attitude to the situation was not to graciously back down – it was to speed up. They cracked on ‘Jeremy Clarkson’ style and by the end of the first day, had removed most of two walls of tiles. Sadly though, they had destroyed about half of the tiles.
Realising the problem, the tiler decided the best thing to do was not to turn up the next day, or the next. Or the next. Until eventually, after three weeks of putting it off, the un-politely told the customer that they couldn’t do the job because they were too busy.

The customer now had a pantry they couldn’t use that was covered in debris, broken tiles and dust.
So they took to google, found Were Tiling and realised that there is indeed a difference between a normal tiler and a speciality Victorian Tiling Expert.

We inspected the situation for the customer and reached a good compromise because they had already lost so many tiles – they could not complete the originally intended tiling design. Instead, we tiled two ‘feature’ walls with the restored tiles. And the other two walls became usable pantry space with a decorative larder cabinet.

So if you are looking to restore tiles that are older than your own Grandmother, then don’t call in a normal tiler. Call in the tiling specialist.