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dirtydog

I suppose we should also include kitchens wall tiles in this aswell as there isn't any difference that I can think of apart from bathrooms generally have a lot more fitments in a lot smaller area.

The first problem with drilling wall tiles in Thailand is that we use percussion drills and not nice gentle hammer drills, percussion drills are great for getting tiles off of walls really quickly and this is what happens if your not careful when you drill your holes into the tiles.

The next problem is you will find that normally many of the wall tiles are actually blown or have air pockets behind parts of them, just need to tap them lightly say with a screw driver and you will hear the difference between well stuck tiles and blown or tiles with air pockets behind them, if you just drill into a blown tile with a percussion drill it will most likely fall off, if you drill into a area with an air pocket behind it it will most likely crack before you have drilled through the tile.

So, if your tile has either of the above problems you need to weaken the tile where you want your hole, in the picture below you can see a cross in black insulation tape, you don't want to use insulation tape but it is better to see in the photo, use white masking tape in a cross where you want the hole, mark it on the tape, with a small center punch or a 3inch concrete nail and hammer tap away at where you want the hole, the outside glazing of wall tiles is really hard, but the inside is quite soft, once you have weakened the area you can now drill it, but be gentle

The tape near the edges of the tile shows the area of where you really don't want someone drilling holes, try to drill too near a corner and the tile may crack, also too near the edge and it is quite likely to crack, if you can you really want all drill holes to be in the grout between the tiles, obviously this is not always possible or wanted due to tile placement.

Insulation tape tends to move all over the place when it is on a tile and your trying to drill it, ordinary masking tape doesn't, also it is easy to mark, the idea of the tape is to help stop the drill bouncing all over the tile when you first start drilling into it.



So what to do about those broken bathroom fitments, the odds are your not going to find anything that will line up with the old holes, so you can leave the tatty old piece of metal up, or, take it down and fill the holes.



Pretty grubby underneath there aint it, green scourer and some bleach soon cleans it up, that high raw plug needs to be knocked in or the bit sticking out cut off.



Bit of grout the same color and it all looks good, don't forget these pictures are showing the area a lot larger than it actually is so generally nobody would notice the repair unless it was at eye level and in an often looked area.



With this shower head it was pretty lucky that the tile spacing worked out right, so, nice and easy to drill and fit, these tiles are 30cms high so it could have been as much as 15cms out, probably the best bet is one of those shower rails that you can slide the shower head up and down on though.



Bit of a mess this one, the reason it is so big is that the valve screws into the pipe fitment, it's behind the toilet so don't really matter but if a stainless or chrome plated cover had been used it would have hidden the mess that it actually is.

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