Kitchen tiling set out from the sightline, not the corner.

Tiling is the last wet trade in a kitchen and the first thing anyone reads at eye level. Whether a floor lasts twenty years or lifts in three is decided long before the adhesive is mixed: whether the substrate is flat and sound, where the wet areas are sealed, which line the setout is struck from, and how the cuts are distributed so the eye never lands on a 15mm sliver beside the oven.

No obligation

Scope of this line item

01 Floor tilingPorcelain

02 Wall & splashback tilingCeramic

03 Substrate levellingScreed

04 Wet-area waterproofingMembrane

05 Setout & cut planningDrawing

06 Joints, grout & sealingFinish

Related line items: Kitchen Splashbacks and Complete Kitchen Renovations.

Reference photograph — a patterned wall tile carried across a return, where the setout has to hold its line through the corner

Substrate and waterproofing

What sits under the tile decides how long it lasts.

Most tiling failures in an older Murrumbeena or Carnegie home are preparation failures: a flexing particleboard floor, an unlevelled slab, or silicone that was never used where the building wanted to move. Preparation is quoted as its own stage so nothing gets absorbed quietly into a square-metre rate.

01 Substrate check — old vinyl, cork and adhesive residue come up, sheet flooring is re-fixed where it moves, and timber floors are checked for deflection before anything rigid goes over them.

02 Levelling — slabs are rarely flat, and large-format tiles are unforgiving of it. A self-levelling compound or screed brings the floor within tolerance so lippage between tiles doesn’t appear along the light from the window.

03 Waterproofing detail — membrane and bond breaker at the wet points: under and behind the sink cabinet, at the dishwasher cavity, and at floor-to-wall junctions where water has somewhere to travel.

04 Perimeter and movement joints — the gap at walls, doorways and long runs stays flexible and is finished in colour-matched silicone rather than grout, so a tight grout line doesn’t do the job a joint was meant to do.

05 Grout and sealing — grout width and colour are chosen with the tile, not after it. Epoxy grout suits heavily used floors and behind the cooktop; porous stone and unglazed surfaces are sealed before grouting so the face doesn’t stain.

Setout is struck from the line you look at most.

A tiler can start in the corner and work out, or start from the line the room is read along and work back. The second takes longer to plan and looks settled for the life of the kitchen.

Wall tiles are centred on the thing the eye fixes on — the cooktop, the window reveal, the range niche — so the full tiles land where they are seen and the cuts are pushed to the ends, behind the tall pantry or above the rangehood. Floor tiles are set to the longest sightline through the room, usually the run from the doorway along the island, with the cut row sized so it never drops below roughly a third of a tile against the joinery.

Everything is dry-laid before it is fixed: the grout line of the splashback is lined up with the benchtop join and the window frame where it can be, returns are mitred rather than butt-cut, and the number of cuts is counted rather than discovered.

Choosing the surface itself? Read Choosing a Kitchen Splashback or see the Kitchen Splashbacks line item.

Reference photograph — wall and floor setout read against a marble-look surface

Materials schedule

Tile formats and how each one behaves.

Format changes the labour as much as the look. A mosaic sheet and a 1200mm porcelain plank cost different amounts to lay in the same room, for reasons worth knowing before the selection is locked in at design stage.

01 PorcelainFloors
Dense and low-absorption, which is why it takes the traffic in front of the sink and the dishwasher. Rectified edges allow tight joints; through-body colour hides chips on an exposed edge.

02 CeramicWalls
Lighter and easier to cut, with the widest colour and glaze range. Suited to walls and splashbacks rather than floors, where the glaze wears.

03 SubwayBond
The bond does the work: brick, stack, vertical or herringbone all read differently from the same tile. Grout colour decides whether the pattern shouts or disappears.

04 MosaicSheet
Sold on sheets, so the sheet joins have to vanish into the pattern. More grout per square metre means more maintenance, but it handles small returns and shaped areas that a large tile cannot.

05 Large formatTolerance
Fewer joints and a calmer floor, but the substrate must be genuinely flat. Back-buttering, levelling clips and two people on the sheet are part of the method, not an extra.

06 Stone & terrazzo-lookSealing
Porous faces are sealed before grouting and re-sealed on a cycle. Batch variation is real — tiles are shuffled across boxes during laying so one dark box doesn’t land in one corner.

Floor tiling and cabinetry: which goes down first.

This single decision changes the tile quantity, the kickboard height and the dishwasher cavity, so it is settled at design stage rather than on the morning the tiler arrives.

Option A — Tile the full floor first

The tile runs wall to wall and the joinery is set on top of a finished surface. More tile and more cost, but appliance and kickboard heights are taken from the final floor level, and a dishwasher or oven can be swapped years later without meeting a tile edge or a step.

Option B — Tile to the kickboard line

Cabinetry is installed and levelled first, and tiling stops under the kick. Less tile, less waste and a shorter day on site — provided the kickboard height and the underbench appliance cavities are set against the finished floor level from the start.

Either way, tiling is scheduled against the cabinetry rather than around it — which is how it sits in the 12-step process, between the cabinetry and benchtop stages and ahead of finishing.

Kitchen Tiling — Murrumbeena VIC

Send us the room, the tile and the setout question.

Tell us the floor area, what is under the existing surface and which tile you are considering, and we’ll come back with a written scope covering preparation, setout, laying, grout and joints — for kitchens in Murrumbeena, Carnegie, Hughesdale, Oakleigh, Chadstone, Malvern East, Bentleigh East, Ormond and McKinnon.

No obligation · or use the contact form