Hi all, I recently engaged a professional tiler to re-lay drummy and dislodged floor tiles in my dining room and hallway. I went onto a website for finding tradies, got a bunch of contacts, checked the reviews, chose a few with the best reviews and ratings, and got a couple of quotes, then selected one of these tradies who gave the slightly more competitive quote.

When he actually did the work I was'nt able to inspect the job straight away as he said not to walk on the tiles for 24 hours, he made remarks though about how the tiles were quite old and not fully symmetrically square, and also that my concrete pad he was laying the tiles on was'nt totally flat, and therefore he had'nt been able to lay the tiles in a completely evenly spaced symmetric grid and had'nt been able to get them all levelled the same way and flush with each other. I challenged him about his comments regarding the symmetry of the tiles but he was insistent on this. He also said he had had to work fairly fast as the job turned out to be slightly bigger than he expected, i.e. about 13 square meters compared to 10 that he originally envisaged. So I paid him and off he went, and I hoped to find good results the next day.

The next day when I inspected the work I was fairly disappointed with the results, the alignment and spacing of the tiles was quite poor between many of the rows and individual tiles, and the levelling from tile to tile was quite uneven with some tiles, 2 or 3 mills different in some cases. Also there were a half dozen tiles of slightly different colour which I asked to be layed in an inconspicuous spot where the fridge would go, but in the end this instruction was ignored and 3 of them were layed in a conspicuous spot.

Ultimately I feel like he rushed the job and the result was poor workmanship. I want to get some other opinions on his comments around how there were things that made it hard for him to lay the tiles evenly and with good alignment, i.e. the old tiles were not perfectly square and the pad had uneven bits. The rest of the tiling in my house is still the original tiling work and looks really neat and flat, but the bit he re-layed keeps standing out to me as shoddy.

I doubt there would be much chance of him coming back and re-doing any of it, and I would'nt want him back anyway to be honest. I do at least feel entitled to give him his very first bad review on the tradie finding website though.

Please see attached pictures. Opinions and advice welcome.