GLASS WALL TILES.

Gloss glass tiles can look very swish but be careful, for all but a more or less showroom installation they are not that practical. Even if they look fantastic when clean, they can soon look awful even after very little use..

Avoid whole areas of gloss glass tiles unless you know the project can take them and the work they create.

All glass, requires very careful installation and appropriate preparation of the backing coat they are to be stuck to. They require a special adhesive with an appropriate chemical cure that will not attack the backing coat applied by the manufacturer. In most cases this means an epoxy adhesive in conjunction with an epoxy grout. Tilers just love this stuff (joke) It is very expensive to buy and very expensive to use so be prepared for fairly high fixing costs. Be warned that when these tiles are fixed, you can see through the sides of the joint, so, if the adhesive is a different colour to the grout it shows and looks horrible.

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Glass is only really practical as a traditional mosaic, or when used as a border tile, insert tile or other feature specifically to enhance a particular ceramic tile. There are some stunning glass products  on the market and we can see glass being used more and more as it develops, especially now there are so few printed design inset tiles around.

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A little girl on one of the jobs we were doing recently summed glass tiles up perfectly for me, she said they looked like 'happy tiles'.

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Wasn't that a brilliant description.