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Building well out of square - tile grid dilemma

AJB Temple

AJB Temple

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Just musing. Not expecting a solution from you guys really. Carried 140 slabs in yesterday and I am knackered already. I've got, now on site, 300 limestone fossil rectangular slabs to lay indoors. Cleared the area and now I have a layout dilemma.

10m by 6 m space main with a side room as well. Down the centre of the whole building (ie more than this room) are a set of 5 brick clad steel posts that are beneath the roof apex. One at each end of the room to be tiled. These steels up with a laser and they deviate only 10mm from a straight line down the core of the building. They lead to double doors at one end that access the newer part of the house. I need to treat this as a datum point for tiling as the eye is drawn down this line.

Here's the problem: the wall to the left deviates by 290mm from this datum line, and also forms a bulge in the room but even so one end is 200mm wider than the other end of the room hence not remotely parallel to the datum line. This is the north wall and will be panelled to create substantial internal insulation.

The opposite wall is south and has a c.3m wide fire hearth and log burner chimney stack. (stupid design - chimney should be on opposite wall). This fireplace and hearth is twisted at an angle of 9 degrees off the datum line. Creates a 8cm tile run off versus the brick hearth over the width of the hearth.

As I need to tile lengthways down the room, the grout line will appear to run off at an angle on both sides of the room. Not sure what to do for the best. I think my only option is to alter the hearth on one wall and step the panelling on the north wall. The room was previously carpeted, so this odd skewed layout was largely hidden. It was a tithe barn so accurate setting out back in the day was not critical.
 
If there is a main feature in the room such as a fireplace then work out square with that and the edges will have to be what they are. I had one out of square edge and made a tapered skirting so the edge was parallel to the grout line.

Bob
 
Depends on your OCD lelvels.
I wouldnt use any datum. Lay a tile somewhere in the middle of the room at an odd angle, and off you go. Admittedly this system ends up with lots of odd shaped cuts at the edges, but it stops ANYONE from eyeing the lines up with anything. :lol:
random is exactly what would have been done back in the day too. 8-)
 
Thanks guys. However, the room that this feeds into is also limestone tiled and this needs to match sensibly with that. I built that room so it is dead on square. Starting in the middle of the room is an interesting idea I must say. Likely to be a recipe for disaster. I would rather rebuild the hearth than accept it being out of square with the tile plan.

I work to a carefully mapped tiling grid and an accurate scale drawing so I maximise the number of of whole tiles, and minimise cuts and bitty little pieces and get good flow into the three adjacent rooms which are also being tiled. My home office is one of them and that is already done and the living room area has to be at right angles or it will look silly. The internal insulation that I am installing helps there in the main room as I can adjust the wall angles a bit, but ideally not 300mm!. Given the voids created by getting things square, there will be a lot of insulation and I am toying with the idea of making insulated sliding window shutters as well.

Interesting ideas though, so thank you.
 
It won’t hide the problem but if you lay them in a brick pattern you aren’t looking down a dead straight grout joint adjacent to the runout so the problem becomes less noticeable.
 
I quite like rooms that aren't square. That's just as well, it's the only sort we have in our house;).

I think there's a risk with old buildings that if you neaten everything up and square it off, it stops looking like a charming old building and becomes more like a new job.

So I would tile in a grid, lined up with the steels and the adjacent rooms, and just accept the need for lots of wedge-shaped pieces around the edges.
 
I would rather rebuild the hearth than accept it being out of square with the tile plan.

Dear sir, you have just broken our OCD meter, the bill will be in the post. :eusa-dance: :eusa-clap: :eusa-dance: :eusa-clap: :eusa-clap: :eusa-clap:
 
Datum to the posts, rug on the floor by the fireplace would be my solution...... :)

You could pack out the stud insulation wall to get that end square if you wanted to, but a perfectly square room in an otherwise old and irregular building will always look 'new' if you see what I mean, the irregularity of old buildings is what adds to their character in my view. Embrace the ambiance!
 
And there we have the nub of it - my wife wants it to look new, fresh and modern. All the oak posts and beams will disappear behind the panelling, because we want to improve the insulation radically. They were hacked about by the original developer and if I want and oak framing look I will just build a new frame internally. I guess the original oak framing was rotten near ground level, as the whole frame was cut away and put on a thick brick plinth. But they bodged it when putting it back together. The upstairs frame is intact. Bottom is steel masquerading as an oak frame.

Bob - the hearth is no big deal. I was going to alter it anyway as it has horrid glazed tiles on it now and they were always going to come off and be replaced with some very large black limestone slabs I have or the white limestone. So I am doing that anyway, its not a really big deal to take the bricks beneath out and reshape the log burner plinth, maybe into a semi circle as that will hide all manner of sins.

Doug - yes your idea makes sense but would look odd as it would look as if the tiles are in the wrong direction for the space I think.
 
I don’t think it would work in your case Adrian due to the grout lines but I had a problem with laying a floor going through two rooms which also had a through fireplace, and trying to get a full board up against the fire on both sides. Due to p..ss poor planning I was going to end up with a full board on one side and a board that tapered down to 40mm on the other. The two sides of the fireplace were out of parallel by 35mm, my only solution was to lose some of the width in a taper on two boards in the door area.
As was said nobody notices, unless you point it out!
Starting at the top it’s boards 2 and 3 in this pic.
For me, ( and you don’t say how it runs out by the time you get to the fireplace) I would use the posts as a datum line and work from there but it does depend on that front edge of the fireplace.
Ian

8C92BB82-AF7E-494C-ABC6-15F13064BFE7.jpeg
 
Thanks Ian. That's helpful.

The fireplace runs out 78mm exactly from one side to the other. So say if the datum to one corner was 3000 the other corner is 3078. That is extremely noticeable as running the tiles from the datum I end up with the grout line touching one corner and off by 78mm on the other. We are going to replace the log burner anyway. It stands on one course of bricks plus a tiled cap. So I will just rip the plinth out and do an arc sufficient for a new log burner. This is extra work (a day or two I expect) but will look a lot more professional. I am fitting a mantle and other bits as well in thick oak.
 
Lasers just transform layouts. So easy to get perfectly square grids measured.
 
I would set out from the centre-line such that the grout lines at the walls as far from the edge of a whole tile as possible. Obviously you have two positions to work with......a grout line on the centre-line, or the centre of the tile on the centre-line. Whichever one keeps the grout line furthest from the walls is the one you need.

The other option to consider is to do whole-tiles-only on the grid, and then instead of using cuts around the perimeter, either use small mosaic-like tiles at 45 degrees for the cuts, or, just use big tiles laid at 45 degrees.
 
Thanks Mike. Makes sense and I had thought similarly. I will dry lay some tiles and see what looks best.

Mosaic edge had not even occurred to me. Will think that over.
 
Mikes approach is the best practical solution. Datum line is now centre tile rather than a grout line and that works best for making edge tiles as wide a possible when they meet the new stud walls. Glad I posted this as would probably have have used datum as a grout line.

Ive decided to love with run off on the north wall (as it is mainly an outward bulge) and totally alter the fireplace plinth on the south wall.
 
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