Tile installers near you

Start with the shower, because it is where the money and the damage both are. A tiled shower is a waterproofing assembly with tile on top. Tile is not waterproof and grout never was - grout is a filler, it is porous, and water passes through it by design. What holds the water is behind the tile: a bonded sheet or liquid membrane, or a pan and a properly formed fall to the drain, over a substrate that belongs in a wet area. Cement backer board or a foam board, not ordinary drywall, and moisture-resistant board is not a waterproofing layer either - it just fails more slowly. You will never see any of this once the tile is on, and you will never see it fail either. The symptom shows up as a soft floor outside the shower or as a stain on the ceiling of the home below, months later, by which point the repair is the whole shower rather than the leak.

The second thing that decides whether a tiled surface lasts is movement. Buildings move - seasonally, thermally, and under load - and tile does not. That is why a proper installation puts movement joints where the field meets a wall, a change of plane or a different material, and at intervals across a large area, more often on anything in sunlight or outdoors. It is why a wood-framed floor is checked for stiffness before tile goes near it: a floor that flexes underfoot will crack grout first and tile second, and no adhesive fixes a springy floor. And on concrete it is why an uncoupling or crack-isolation layer exists, so a crack in the slab does not print straight through into the tile. All of which produces the sentence this category most needs said out loud: new tile over a substrate that is moving, wet or unsupported buys you the same failure again on the same schedule. If a floor bounces, if there is a leak, if the board behind the shower is soft - that is the work, and the tile is the last quarter of it.

The rest of the category is more cheerful and much of it is small. A kitchen backsplash is a half-day to a day and one of the highest-value changes in a GTA condo. A regrout takes the old grout out mechanically and replaces it, which restores how a shower looks and does absolutely nothing for a membrane that has failed underneath - worth being clear-eyed about, because a regrout sold as a leak repair is the most common false economy here. Resealing applies to the grout and to natural stone, which is porous and wants sealing on a schedule rather than once. Screeding is levelling before tile, or forming the fall toward a drain. Terracotta and other unglazed clay is its own method: sealed before grouting, or the grout stains it permanently. Large-format tile is a separate skill again, because the bigger the tile the flatter the substrate has to be and the less forgiving the edges are.

To get offers that hold, measure and say. Square footage or the wall dimensions, the tile size if you have chosen one, and whether you are supplying the tile or want it supplied - most posts here supply their own, in which case order more than the area and keep the overage, because dye lots differ between batches and a repair two years from now needs tile from the same one. Say what is coming off first and who is disposing of it, because tile demolition is heavy and a condo has rules about how it leaves the building. Say if there is heating going under the floor, since it is embedded in the mortar and cannot be corrected afterwards without lifting the tile. Say what is behind the shower now. And leave time at the end: a floor is not walked on and a shower is not used the day it is grouted, and in an unheated space in a GTA winter that wait gets considerably longer.