Tiling Costs VIC 2026 - Get Free Quotes

Tiling Costs in VIC

Tiling labour in Victoria typically costs $45 to $130 per square metre, and where you land depends mostly on the tile and the surface it is going onto. Floor tiling runs $45 to $80, wall tiling $55 to $95 because there are more cuts and more time on a ladder, and large format or mosaic work $80 to $130. Tiles themselves are supplied separately. They range from $20 per square metre for a basic ceramic to well over $150 for natural stone, and a kitchen renovation will chew through more than you expect. Tiling is a preparation trade wearing a decorative coat.

A complete bathroom, tiled and waterproofed, generally lands between $3,000 and $7,500. That figure includes the waterproofing at $45 to $75 per square metre, any screeding to set the floor falls at $30 to $60, and the tiling itself, and it varies with the size of the room and the tile chosen. A small ensuite sits at the bottom. A large main bathroom in natural stone sits well above the top, as any bathroom cost guide will show. What you cannot see is what fails.

The most important thing to understand about tiling is that the tiles are the least of it. What decides whether a bathroom lasts twenty years or leaks in three is the preparation underneath, the waterproofing membrane, and the falls in the floor, and none of that is visible once the tiles are on. A beautiful tile job over bad prep is a beautiful tile job that will fail. You cannot see the difference from the doorway. The tiles are the cheapest decision in the room. A quote silent on preparation has not inspected the floor.

Waterproofing in a wet area is regulated building work in Victoria and this matters more than most homeowners realise. It must comply with the Australian Standards and it must be done properly, because a failed membrane means water in the wall cavity, rot in the frame, mould in the next room, and a repair that means taking the entire bathroom out. A bathroom waterproofing failure is the single most expensive thing that goes wrong in a domestic renovation. It is also entirely preventable. Bounce underfoot is the enemy of every tile ever laid.

Substrate preparation is where a cheap quote hides. Tiling onto a flat, sound, level surface is quick and predictable, whereas tiling onto an old timber floor that flexes, a slab that dips, or a wall that is out of plumb requires sheeting, screeding or packing before a single tile is laid. A quote that does not mention preparation has either not looked or is planning to skip it. Ask what they intend to do about the floor. The screed decides where the water goes, and nothing afterwards can argue with it.

Removing old tiles is a real cost and a genuinely unpleasant job. It is noisy, filthy, produces silica dust that is a serious health matter, and it frequently damages the substrate underneath, particularly where the old tiles were laid on plasterboard or an old screed. It should be a line in the quote. Where it is not, ask whether it is included. Ceramic does not flex, and it will not learn to. Silica dust is a genuine health matter, not an inconvenience.

To get a quote you can compare, someone needs to see the room. A price per square metre quoted over the phone tells you nothing, because the tiler cannot know whether your floor is level, your walls are plumb, or your substrate is sound, and those three things are the whole job. A good tiler will want to inspect. Anyone quoting a bathroom sight unseen is guessing. Grout is a filler; the membrane is the barrier.

The Prep Is the Job

Tiling is a preparation trade with a decorative finish, and homeowners have this exactly backwards. The visible skill is in the setting out and the cuts, but the durability of the job is decided entirely by what happens before the first tile is laid, and a tiler who spends a day preparing a floor before laying anything is not padding the bill. They are doing the job properly. The tiles are the easy part. Nobody sees the waterproofing, which is precisely the problem.

The substrate has to be flat, sound and rigid, and old Victorian houses rarely offer all three. A timber floor that moves underfoot will crack grout and eventually pop tiles, because ceramic does not flex and the adhesive bed will not save it, so the floor must be stiffened or sheeted before anything goes on it. Bounce is the enemy of tile. A flooring assessment before tiling is money well spent in an older home. A membrane tiled over too early has been ruined invisibly. The corners and junctions are where every membrane fails.

Screeding is how a floor is made flat and how the falls are set. A sand and cement screed is laid over the substrate to level it, or deliberately to slope it towards a waste, and it costs $30 to $60 per square metre, and it is the layer that decides whether water runs to the drain or sits in a puddle. Getting the screed right is the whole game in a shower. It cannot be fixed afterwards without taking the floor up. Flood testing is cheap, quick and almost never requested.

Walls need attention too and out-of-plumb walls are common in this state. A wall that leans will show it in the tile joints, because tiles are laid level and the wall is not, and the gap grows visibly across a run, so packing or sheeting a bad wall straight before tiling is what produces a job that looks right. A plastering repair before tiling is often the honest fix. Hiding a bad wall behind tile does not work. Water leaving the shower is the only test that matters.

Concrete slabs need their own preparation and it is often skipped. A slab may be uneven, may have laitance or curing compound on the surface that stops adhesive bonding, and may need grinding before anything is laid, and a concrete grinding pass is sometimes the difference between tiles that stay down and tiles that drum. Tap a finished floor and listen. A hollow sound means the tile is not bonded. A waste set high creates a puddle nothing can fix. Linear drains exist because large tiles cannot bend.

Waterproofing and the Law

Waterproofing a wet area is regulated building work in Victoria and it is not a task for the enthusiastic. It must comply with the Australian Standards governing waterproofing of domestic wet areas, and those standards specify where the membrane must go, how far up the walls, how it must be dressed into the waste and around penetrations, and how long it must cure. None of it is decorative. It is the only thing between your shower and your wall frame. Small tiles follow a fall; big ones fight it.

The membrane goes everywhere water can reach and the shower is only the start. The shower floor and walls to a specified height, the whole bathroom floor, behind the bath, around the vanity and up the walls in splash zones all need protection, and every penetration, every pipe, every screw, every waste is a hole that must be individually sealed. The corners and junctions are where membranes fail. That is where a professional spends the time. Porcelain wears blades, and blades cost money.

The membrane must cure before tiling and this is where the schedule gets compressed. A liquid membrane typically needs 24 to 48 hours to cure fully depending on the product and the weather, and a tiler under pressure to finish may tile onto a membrane that is not ready, which compromises it, and nobody will ever see that this happened. Rushing the cure is one of the commonest failures. It is also completely invisible. Stone is a commitment, not a purchase. Ask for the slip rating before you fall for the finish.

Flood testing is how you know it works and almost nobody asks for it. Once the membrane has cured, the shower can be plugged and filled with water for 24 hours to confirm it holds, and it is a simple, cheap check that a good waterproofing contractor will be entirely happy to do. Ask for the flood test explicitly. A contractor who refuses is telling you something. Buy the extra ten per cent now, not in five years.

Certification matters and you should keep the paperwork. Waterproofing is regulated building work, and where it forms part of a larger job the documentation belongs with your building paperwork, because a purchaser or their building inspection may ask about it. Keep the receipts and any certificates. A bathroom with no evidence of compliant waterproofing is a question at sale. Batches vary, and the shed is where spares belong.

A failed membrane is the most expensive defect in a house. Water passing through failed waterproofing rots timber framing, saturates plaster, feeds mould, stains the ceiling of the room below, and the only real repair is to strip the bathroom back and start again, which is a five-figure job. Mould appearing on the wall outside a shower is a warning. A mould treatment deals with the symptom, but water is getting in somewhere. A levelling system is not optional on large format. Lipping hides at standing height and shouts in raking light.

Floor Falls and Drainage

Water does not run uphill and a shower floor that does not fall to the waste will pond forever. The floor inside a shower must slope towards the drain across its whole area, and that slope is created in the screed beneath the tiles, and getting it wrong means water sits in a puddle after every shower, stains the grout, breeds mould and eventually finds its way out under the screen. It is the commonest complaint about a new bathroom. It is also the hardest to fix, short of a full bathroom renovation. Mosaics are slow because there are simply thousands of them.

The fall must be even and it must be everywhere. A common failure is a floor that falls correctly near the waste but is flat in the corners, which produces a shower that mostly drains but always has two wet corners, and the tiler achieved that by getting the middle right and letting the edges go. Look hard at the corners and edges. That is where a rushed screed shows. Epoxy grout costs more because it is harder to work.

The waste itself needs to sit correctly and it should be the lowest point. A waste set even a few millimetres too high creates a permanent puddle around it no matter how good the fall is, and coordinating the waste height with the plumber before the screed goes down is essential, which is why bathroom renovation plumbing and tiling have to talk to each other. Trades that do not coordinate produce this fault. It is a coordination failure, not a tiling one. Pale grout on a kitchen floor is a decision you will regret. Cracked grout means something is moving underneath.

Linear drains have changed how bathrooms are built and they are worth understanding. A long slot drain along one wall lets the floor fall in a single direction rather than towards a central point, which allows large format tiles to be used without cutting them into a four-way fall, and it is why they have become so popular. Linear drains cost more than a point waste. They also make large tiles genuinely possible in a shower. Movement joints are not decoration.

The bathroom floor outside the shower needs a fall too and people forget it. Water splashes, and a floor waste in the main bathroom floor is only useful if the floor actually drains to it, and a flat bathroom floor with a waste in the corner is a decorative waste. Water should always be able to leave. That principle governs everything in a wet area, including the waterproofing beneath. An old timber floor must be made rigid before anything is laid.

Tile Types and Costs

Ceramic is the cheapest and the most forgiving. It is softer, easier to cut, and suits walls and light-traffic floors, and it costs $20 to $50 per square metre, which makes it the sensible choice on a budget or in a rental. It chips more easily than porcelain. It is nonetheless perfectly adequate for a great many rooms, including a laundry. Sheeting adds height, and height matters at the doorway. The subfloor is worth a look before you tile over it.

Porcelain is denser, harder and less porous, and it is what most Victorian bathrooms use now. It costs $35 to $90 per square metre, it handles floor traffic and wet areas well, and its low porosity means it absorbs almost no water, which is exactly what you want in a shower. It is harder to cut and it wears blades. That difficulty is part of why the labour costs what it does. A 1970s bathroom often has no waterproofing at all.

Natural stone is beautiful, expensive and demanding. Marble, travertine and limestone cost $60 to $200 per square metre and beyond, they are porous, they stain, they need sealing on installation and resealing periodically, and acidic cleaners will etch them permanently. Stone is a commitment rather than a purchase. Anyone laying it should know exactly what they are doing. New tiles over a failed membrane simply hide the leak better.

Slip resistance is not a detail and it is a genuine safety matter in a wet room. Tiles carry a slip rating, and a polished porcelain that looks superb in a showroom can be dangerously slick underfoot when wet, which matters enormously in a bathroom used by anyone elderly. Ask for the rating rather than assuming. A non-slip coating can be applied afterwards, but choosing the right tile is better. Adhesive does not naturally grip glaze. Regrout before you retile, every time.

Buy ten per cent more than you measure and buy it all at once. Tiles are made in batches and the colour varies slightly between them, so a box bought six months later will not match, and you need offcuts for the cuts, breakages, and any future repair. Keep the leftovers in the shed. A cracked tile in five years is a trivial tiling repair only if you have a matching spare. Grout over grout has nothing to hold on to.

Large Format and Mosaics

Large format tiles are the current fashion and they are unforgiving. A 600 by 1200 tile, or larger, produces a floor with very few grout lines and a clean modern look, but it will not bend to follow an uneven floor, and any dip or hump in the substrate shows up as a lipped edge where one tile sits proud of its neighbour. Large tiles demand a flat floor. That is the whole story. Every internal corner should be silicone, without exception.

Levelling systems are how a professional gets them flat. Clips and wedges hold adjacent tiles in the same plane while the adhesive cures, eliminating the lipping that would otherwise appear, and they cost time and money and are exactly why large format labour is dearer. A tiler who does not use them on large tiles is gambling. Run your hand across a finished floor and you will feel any lip immediately, which is why a flooring specialist checks it this way. Drummy tiles are a warning, not a blemish. Tap the floor and it will tell you the truth.

Large tiles in a shower are a problem because of the falls. A shower floor must slope in several directions towards a central waste, and a large rigid tile cannot follow a compound slope, which is precisely why linear drains exist and why most showers with big tiles use one. Small tiles or mosaics follow a fall naturally. Physics decides this, not fashion, and no plumbing trick will change it. The cuts are where the craft shows itself.

Mosaics are slow, skilled and expensive to lay. They arrive on mesh sheets that must be aligned so the joints between sheets are invisible, they need more grout and more cleaning, and a mosaic shower floor takes several times as long as the same area in a large tile. Labour runs at the top of the range for good reason. It is genuinely finicky work. Preparation is where the honest quote earns its money.

Small tiles in a shower floor are not a style choice but a practical one. The many joints allow the sheet to conform to the fall in every direction, they give better grip underfoot when wet, and they are why so many showers pair a large format wall with a mosaic floor. Function is driving that combination. The look is a happy consequence. The invisible work is the product you are buying. Rushing a membrane is how a bathroom fails in three years.

Grout and Sealing

Grout is not waterproof and this surprises almost everybody. It is a cement product, it is porous, and it will let water through given time, which is precisely why the membrane beneath it exists, and a homeowner who believes the grout is keeping the water in has misunderstood the system. Grout is a filler and a finish. The waterproofing is the barrier.

Epoxy grout is a genuine upgrade and it costs more. It is non-porous, it resists staining and mould, and it does not need sealing, and it is considerably harder to work with, which is why tilers charge more to use it. On a shower floor it is money well spent. On a kitchen splashback it is arguably unnecessary. A pretty tile job over bad prep is still a failed tile job.

Grout colour is a decision people regret. A pale grout on a floor will show every mark, particularly in a kitchen or an entry, and a very dark grout against a white tile makes every slightly imperfect joint stand out, and the safe answer is usually a mid tone. Think about cleaning, not just the showroom. You will live with it for years.

Sealing is required for stone and for cement-based grout, and skipping it is a false economy. A penetrating sealer soaks into the surface and repels water and staining without changing the appearance, and it needs reapplying every few years, particularly on a floor, and a sealing product suited to the material matters. Do not seal glazed porcelain. It does not need it and the sealer will simply sit on the surface. You cannot inspect a membrane once the tiles are on it.

Cracked grout is a symptom rather than a fault in itself. Grout cracks because something is moving, usually a substrate that flexes, and simply regrouting a floor that is moving will produce the same crack again within a year, which is why the cause has to be found first. Movement joints exist for this reason. A tiler who leaves them out on a large floor, or on a concrete slab, has stored up a problem.

Old Floors and Old Homes

Victoria's period housing presents the classic tiling problem, and it is the floor. A timber floor on stumps in an old Melbourne terrace or a Ballarat cottage moves seasonally, flexes underfoot, and is rarely level, and laying ceramic straight onto it is asking for cracked grout and drummy tiles within a couple of years. Tile does not tolerate movement. The floor must be made rigid first. Old Victorian floors were never built to carry ceramic.

Sheeting is the standard answer and it is not optional. A cement sheet or a fibre cement underlay is fixed over the timber floor, creating a stable, rigid, water-tolerant surface for the tiles, and it is what allows a wet area to be built over a timber substrate at all. Sheeting adds real cost to the job. It also adds height, which matters at doorways.

Floor height is the practical problem that catches renovators. Sheeting, screeding and tiling together can add thirty or forty millimetres to a floor, and in an old house with existing door heights and a hallway floor at a fixed level, that difference has to be managed at the threshold. Plan for it before you start. A bathroom floor that finishes above the hallway is an awkward permanent trip. The shower floor is the hardest thing in the house to get right.

The subfloor deserves a look before anything is tiled over it. A period home on stumps with a damp subfloor may have rot in the bearers or joists beneath the bathroom, and tiling a beautiful new floor over rotten timber is a waste of money, so somebody should get underneath and look. A floorboard repair before tiling is far cheaper than after. Bathrooms are where subfloor rot usually starts.

Old tiles in old bathrooms often hide worse news. Stripping a 1970s bathroom back frequently reveals no waterproofing at all, because it was not required in the way it is now, and what has been keeping the water in is a combination of grout, luck and the tiles themselves. Expect that discovery on any old bathroom. It is why a bathroom renovation in an old house so often costs more than the quote for the visible work. Ask what happens under the tiles, not just on top of them.

Tiling Over Old Tiles

Tiling over existing tiles is possible and it is frequently a bad idea. It saves the cost and mess of demolition, it avoids damaging the substrate, and on a sound wall in a dry area it can work perfectly well, which is why people ask about it. The problems are height, bond and what you are covering up. Each of those can undo the saving.

In a wet area, tiling over old tiles usually means tiling over old waterproofing, or over none at all. If the existing membrane has failed, and in a bathroom old enough to be retiled it very well may have, then a new layer of tile does nothing except hide the failure more thoroughly, and the water keeps going where it has been going. That is why most tilers will refuse the job. They are protecting you as much as themselves, and a building inspection would raise the same concern. Fashion chose large tiles; physics did not.

Bond is the technical problem. Adhesive must grip a glazed tile surface, which is designed specifically to be non-porous, and it requires a proper primer or a mechanical key, and where that is done badly the new tiles will drum and eventually lift. It can be done properly. It is simply easier to get wrong than tiling onto a prepared substrate.

Height is the practical killer. Another ten to fifteen millimetres of tile and adhesive raises the floor, which affects the door, the skirtings, the threshold, and in a shower it raises the floor relative to the waste, which is exactly what you do not want. On a floor it is often unworkable. On a wall it matters much less, which is why a small kitchen job can often get away with it. A wet corner after every shower is a fall that was never achieved.

The honest position is that in a dry area it is often fine and in a wet area it is usually wrong. A kitchen splashback over old tiles is generally unproblematic, whereas a shower over old tiles is a gamble with the most expensive defect in the house. Take the old ones off in a wet area. That is the advice a good tiler will give you.

Repairs and Regrouting

A great many bathrooms are retiled when they should have been regrouted. Discoloured, cracked or missing grout makes a bathroom look finished long before it actually is, and regrouting a shower costs $400 to $900 against many thousands for a retile, which makes it the obvious first move. A regrout buys you several more years. It also tells you whether the underlying problem is cosmetic. The plumber and the tiler must agree on the waste height.

Regrouting means removing the old grout, not skimming over it. The old grout is raked or ground out of the joints to a proper depth, the joints are cleaned, and new grout is worked in, because grout laid on top of grout has nothing to grip and will fail quickly. This is why a proper shower regrout takes a day rather than an hour. The shortcut is visible within months.

Silicone is not grout and the two do different jobs. The internal corners, the wall-to-floor junction, and anywhere two planes meet must be silicone rather than grout, because those joints move and grout cracks when it is asked to flex, and a tiler who grouts an internal corner has made a mistake that will show within a year. Every corner should be silicone. It is a quick way to judge a tiling job. Sealer belongs on stone and cement grout, not on glazed porcelain.

A single cracked tile can be replaced without retiling the room. The tile is cut out carefully, the bed cleaned, and a matching tile bedded in, and this is exactly why keeping spares from the original job matters so much, because an exact match is otherwise almost impossible. A tiling repair is a small job. Finding the tile is usually the hard part.

Drummy tiles are a warning rather than a cosmetic issue. A tile that sounds hollow when tapped is not bonded to the substrate, which means the adhesive failed or was never applied properly, and where several tiles are drummy the problem is the installation rather than the tile. Isolated drumminess can be repaired. Widespread drumminess means the floor comes up. Movement will find the grout line, wherever you put it.

Telling a Good Job From a Pretty One

Anyone can make new tiles look good on the day, and that is the difficulty for a homeowner. The things that separate a durable tiling job from a decorative one are largely invisible or subtle, and they are worth knowing so you can check them, because by the time a bad job announces itself the tiler is long gone. There are a handful of tells. They take about five minutes to check, and no bathroom repair service will mind you doing so.

Check the internal corners for silicone rather than grout. Every corner where two tiled planes meet should be a flexible silicone joint, because those junctions move, and grout in an internal corner will crack, which is one of the clearest signs of a tiler who has cut a corner in both senses. Look at the wall-to-floor junction. Look at the vertical corners where the shower screen will land. Stiffen the floor first, and the tiles will look after themselves.

Tap the floor and listen for hollowness. A properly bedded tile sounds solid, while a drummy one rings hollow, and a floor with widespread hollow tiles has an adhesive coverage problem that will produce cracked tiles and lifted edges under traffic. Walk the whole floor tapping as you go. It is the single most revealing check available.

Look along the tiles from a low angle towards a light. Lipping, where one tile sits proud of its neighbour, is invisible from standing height and glaringly obvious from a low angle in raking light, and on a large format floor it is the tell of a tiler who did not use a levelling system. Run a hand across the joints. Your fingers will find what your eyes miss. Thresholds are where a raised bathroom floor becomes a daily nuisance.

Pour a bucket of water on the shower floor and watch it. It should run to the waste and leave, from every corner, and any water that sits is a fall that was not achieved, which is the most consequential fault and the least fixable one. Do this before you pay. It is the most useful five seconds of the whole handover.

Check the cuts around penetrations and edges. A skilled tiler leaves neat, consistent cuts around a waste, a tap, a niche and a doorway, and cuts that are ragged, uneven or filled with grout to hide the gap indicate haste, which usually indicates haste elsewhere too. The cuts are where the craft is visible. They are also where the shortcuts show, particularly around a vanity. Rot under a bathroom is common and rarely looked for.

What Affects the Cost

Tile size drives labour in both directions and it is not intuitive. Mosaics are slow because there are thousands of them, large format tiles are slow because they are heavy and demand a perfect substrate, and the comfortable middle sizes are the cheapest to lay. Choosing a fashionable extreme costs money. That is a design decision with a price attached, much like choosing timber over tile.

The substrate decides the real cost of the job. A flat, sound, level floor is quick, while an old timber floor needing sheeting, a slab needing grinding, or a wall needing packing all add days before any tile is laid, and this is the single biggest variable between a cheap quote and an honest one. Ask what the preparation involves. The answer separates the quotes. Height, bond and concealment are the three problems with tiling over.

The amount of cutting is a genuine driver. A rectangular room with a plain layout is fast, while a bathroom full of niches, corners, penetrations, a shower hob and a curved wall is slow and skilled, and every cut is time. Complexity in the layout is an honest cost. A simple layout genuinely does save money on a flooring budget.

Waterproofing and screeding are separate line items and they should be. At $45 to $75 and $30 to $60 per square metre respectively they are a substantial part of a bathroom quote, and a quote that does not list them either includes them invisibly or is planning to skip them. Ask them which of the two it is. There is no third possibility. A day spent preparing beats a decade of cracked grout.

Finally, removal and making good round out the total. Stripping old tiles, disposing of the rubble, repairing the substrate damaged in the process, and any plaster repair where a wall sheet is torn are all real costs, and a low quote that omits them will find you later. Ask what happens if the substrate is damaged during removal. In an old bathroom the substrate usually is damaged.

Tiling Costs Across Melbourne

Across Melbourne, tiling rates are reasonably consistent and the variation comes from the building rather than the postcode. The inner suburbs carry the oldest floors, with timber substrates that flex and walls that lean, and preparation there is a bigger part of the job than the tiling. The outer growth corridors are mostly slab-on-ground, which is faster and more predictable to tile, though a grinding pass is sometimes needed. Access and parking in the inner city genuinely affect a job that involves carting tonnes of tile and rubble. The hollow ring of a drummy tile is a sound worth learning.

Apartments carry a logistical cost that houses do not. Getting tiles and adhesive up a lift, carting rubble down, and working within building access hours all lengthen a job, and some buildings restrict noisy work to particular times, which stretches a two-day tiling job across a week. Tell the tiler it is an apartment. It changes how they price the days, exactly as it does for a kitchen floor.

Tiling Costs in Regional VIC

In regional Victoria, labour rates are a little lower and travel is the main variable. Tilers cover the regional centres well, though a remote property may attract travel, and freight on tiles is a real cost when a pallet has to come from Melbourne. The goldfields cities carry an enormous stock of period homes with timber floors. Preparation is a bigger share of the job there than anywhere, and floorboard repair is often needed first. Raking light is the cheapest inspection tool there is.

The goldfields bathrooms are the classic Victorian tiling job. Ballarat and Bendigo hold enormous numbers of Victorian-era homes on timber stumps, and a bathroom in one of those needs the floor stiffened, sheeted and screeded before a tile is laid, which is most of the labour. The tiling is the last and easiest part. Budgeting only for the tiling, and forgetting the plaster, is how those jobs blow out.

Freight on tiles is a genuine regional cost. A pallet of porcelain is heavy, most of it comes through Melbourne, and delivering it to a rural property costs real money that a Melbourne quote does not carry. Order everything in one delivery. A second freight run for the tiles you were short of is expensive. A bucket of water settles the argument about falls.

Wherever you are, insist the tiler sees the room. A per-square-metre rate quoted from a floor plan tells you nothing about the preparation, and the preparation is where the money is, so a quote without an inspection is a quote for a job nobody has assessed. The site inspection costs you nothing. Skipping it costs a great deal.

What to Look Out For

The most important thing to guard against is a quote that says nothing about preparation. Tiling is a preparation trade, and a quote priced purely per square metre of tile laid has either not inspected the substrate or is planning to lay tiles straight onto whatever is there, and in an old Victorian house that is exactly how a floor fails. Ask what they will do about the floor. The answer separates a tiler from a tile layer. Ragged cuts around a waste tell you how the rest was done.

Never let waterproofing be treated casually. It is regulated building work, it must comply with the standards, and a contractor who suggests it can be skimped, rushed or skipped in a wet area is proposing the most expensive defect in domestic building. Ask about the cure time before tiling. A membrane tiled over too early has been compromised invisibly.

Watch for grout in the internal corners. Every corner where two tiled planes meet must be silicone, because grout will crack where a joint moves, and grouted corners are the clearest visible sign of a tiler taking shortcuts. Check the corners at handover. It takes ten seconds and it tells you a great deal. The membrane, not the grout, is what keeps the wall dry.

Be sceptical of tiling over old tiles in a wet area. It saves demolition, but it usually means tiling over waterproofing that has failed or never existed, and the new tiles will simply conceal the leak more effectively. A handyman offering to tile over your old shower is not doing you a favour. Take the old tiles off.

Test the falls before you pay. Pour water on the shower floor and watch where it goes, and if it sits anywhere, the fall was not achieved, and that is the single most consequential fault a bathroom can have because fixing it means taking the floor up. Do the water test at handover. Once you have paid, your leverage is gone. Silica dust is why proper tilers cut wet.

Finally, try the cheap remedy first. A regrout at $400 to $900, or a reseal, will restore a tired-looking bathroom for a fraction of a retile, and a regrout and leak repair is the honest first step where the tiles themselves are sound. Retile because you want a new bathroom. Do not retile hoping it stops a leak nobody has diagnosed.

What to Look for in a Quote in VIC

A strong tiling quote separates preparation, waterproofing and tiling. It should state what substrate work is included, whether sheeting or screeding is required and at what cost, what waterproofing is being applied and to what standard, the tiling rate and the area, whether removal and disposal of the old tiles is included, and what happens if the substrate is damaged during demolition. It should also say who is supplying the tiles. With that on paper you are comparing scopes rather than square metres. Freight on a pallet of porcelain is not a rounding error.

Ask each tiler what they think of your floor. Their answer tells you immediately whether they have inspected anything, because a tiler who has walked on the floor, felt it flex, and checked the walls for plumb will tell you honestly what preparation it needs, while one quoting from a plan will simply give you a rate. That question separates the careful from the casual. It is the most revealing thing you can ask.

Compare quotes on inclusions rather than the rate per square metre. A cheaper quote that omits the screed, applies a thinner membrane, skips the levelling system on large format tiles, or leaves you to arrange the renovation trades that follow is not cheaper, it is incomplete, and the difference is buried under the tiles where you will never see it. Describing your job once on The Quote Yard brings responses from several tilers so you can weigh what each includes. On tiling, the invisible work is the product.

Finally, sequence it properly and allow for the cure. Waterproofing must cure before tiling, tiling must cure before grouting, and the shower cannot be used for a period afterwards, and a bathroom refit programme that does not allow for this is a programme that will pressure somebody into rushing a membrane. Do not compress the waterproofing. Getting the preparation, the membrane and the falls right is what turns a tiling job into a bathroom that lasts.