Andy Hall wrote:

Here's the issue with this one though.

- I went for 600x400 slates for kitchen, conservatory and some other
areas - approximately 60-70 sqm in all. Having the larger tile
sizes, vs. 300x300 makes them look a lot better and the spaces that
they are in larger. These tiles are heavy in this size and need to
be held at arm's length to lay.

- If you buy a slate that is calibrated on both sides - i.e. flat and
constant thickness, then it is not so hard to even out the floor.
The types that are cleaved on one side (the upper) and that have a
more natural appearance, vary in thickness by up to 6mm. You have to
account for that in the laying and bedding and sorting thicknesses by
area without ending up with too uniform colours in one area. This
involves a lot of moving round of the slates.


- This is not a job that will be repeated in a hurry and there is no
real scope for learning as you go because you will have wasted
material over quite a large area before it becomes obvious that there
is a problem. It is *very* noticable when a floor is done badly.
The material is not so cheap that one would want to waste too much of
it - £25-30/m^2 is typical.

- The guys that did ours took about 8 man days on it.

When I stacked that lot up and considered that the supplier and
fitters own any problems, it really didn't make sense to DIY it.
I watched what they were doing on a couple of the days and have an
appreciation of what is involved, but still wouldn't take it on.


Thanks for that - very useful.

If I do decide to do it myself, I will probably go for much smaller
slates - a local place keeps 30x40, which is a more manageable weight.

--
Grunff