We live in an Edwardian home and when I pulled up the carpet in the hallway I was really excited to find the original black and white tiles there. I was relieved to find the majority of the floor was in good condition with only a few small patches that had been filled in with concrete.
The first job was to clean off all the carpet glue and paint splashed. We used patio brick cleaner and a lot of elbow grease.
The floor came up really well. The next step was to dig out the patches of concrete. This proved to be more challenging and required brute force and unfortunately this loosened considerably more tiles than we expected. The troubled patch doubled in size!
The loose tiles were easy to put back in place but I really didn’t want to use reproduction tiles to replace the missing tiles. After a bit of searching online I was fortunate to find someone on Ebay who had just replaced their outdoor Edwardian path and had literally thousands of the tiles for sale. These tiles were extremely dirty, with 100 years of London pollution ground in to them, but they did eventually clean up.
Once all the tiles had been stuck in place and grouted, I gave them a coat of sealer to finish them off. We’re really pleased with the finished product (and probably saved £100’s by undertaking this ourselves).
