Damage to my tiles, can it be fixed? - TilersForums.com

[ThomasJamesReid]

Hello, hoping you can offer some advice,
We recently had awnings fitted to our balcony, as you can hopefully see from the photos the balcony is tiled with porcelain tiles. To attached the guide wires to the balcony floor, the installers drilled the tiles and then hammered a slightly expanded pin into the tile. During the hammering, the tiles significantly chipped (as you can see from the photos), unfortunately, then carried on and did this to all of the tiles. There was no prewarning that this was a risk, the person that came to quote had seen what the floor tiles were. In the eve, when we wound the awning up, one of the six pins just popped out.
I’m not a professional, but in my opinion, they should have drilled the tile, secured some sort of anchoring into the floor and then screwed the fitting in. It would have been much more secure and wouldn’t have popped out.
Couple of questions:

• I’m am going to ask for the tiles to be replaced (we have spares), do see any other way to fix this?
• How realistic is it that then can remove a tile that close to a glass balustrade?
• How do you think these should have been secured to the floor?

Photos attached, thanks for your help,

 

[Old Mod]

Oh my word, what a mess!
yes tiles can be replaced, but where you currently have nice finishes around the balustrade, cutting around them won’t have such a good finish.
you’ll end up with a mastic joint around them unless the complete balustrade is removed first.
Unless those foot plates can be slid down on top.
They need to drill a hole larger than required for the anchor and anchor them in to the substrate below, so that there is no tension placed on the tile at all.
It looks rushed and done without any due care at all.
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I certainly wouldn’t want to try and cut those tiles out with the glass in place.

 

[al strachan]

i dont think drilling the holes have been the problem. you can see pretty far down the rawl bolts (the vertical slots) this is the part that should be deep inside and expanding inside the hole. With them not being deep enough they are expanding onto the tile and burtsting them.

not only from asthetic point of view, the bolts arent deep enough and i'd question if it was structurally sound.

Personally i'd leave the tiles as is. maybe get the contractor back to firstly replace the rawl bolts and drill them deeper. Then a nice stainless steel plate covering the area of the affected tiles wouldnt look out of place

All just my opinion. I'm not a tiler, but in a past life i installed hundreds of rawl bolts, and those aint right.

 

[Time's Ran Out]

As above really - get them back and ask them to find a solution to their mistake!

 

[roadking]

Magicman will sort it no problem !

 

[Sonic dlf]

I hope you didn't pay them , I would want compensation for that mess ,
And as stated above get some polished stainless plates made to go over the top

 

[Bond]

looks like they’ve hit steel re-bar when drilling for the bolts, one solution would be to have stainless steel plates fabricated with an anchoring point such that it would cover the mess.

 

[Tile life]

What nob jobs , so unprofessional. Looks like they used a standard masonry drill bit but they should have known to use a porcelain hole saw. I would get them back to sort all of their dodgy work out.

 

[Lou]

Did they sort out the damage in the end?