How much tile adhesive to use per square metre

Tiling requires a lot of planning. Even before you buy the tiles you have to calculate a budget and make sure you have enough money to complete the project. If you plan to tile use a tiler for the job, he will probably tell you how much of each type of supplies you will need. However, if you are planning to do the tiling yourself, there are a number of cost issues you should consider.

Although many people would only consider the cost of the tiles before starting to tile, you should also take into account the cost of any special equipment, spacers, tile adhesive and grout. These extra could give you a nasty shock in the form of an overspend on your project if you don’t calculate them accurately beforehand. Worse still, failure to reserve enough money before you start could mean you run out of cash before you are able to buy all the necessary supplies. This would leave you with a project in limbo until you can raise more money to buy all supplies and complete the project.

Tile adhesive and grout are two different things. You may decide to use tile adhesive to do the grouting as well. However, that would increase the project costs because grout is cheaper than tile adhesive. Use tile adhesive for sticking the tiles down and get a cheaper group to fill in the gaps between tiles.

A pre-mixed tile adhesive is quicker to apply, but a tile cement powder would be cheaper. Generally, tilers use the pre-mixed type of adhesive for wall tiles and a bag of powdered tile cement for floor tiles. The pre-mixed adhesive is measured in litres and the powdered cement is measured in kilograms.

You need different amounts of tile adhesive depending on whether you are tiling a floor or a wall. As a general rule of thumb, you need 1.5 litres (53 fl oz) of pre-mixed adhesive for each square metre of wall that you tile, to cover 10 square feet of wall. Floor tiles require about 3 kg (6.5 lbs) of tile adhesive per square metre for 10 square feet of floor.