Subway, mosaic, herringbone, large-format porcelain, natural stone. Any layout looks good on Instagram. What decides whether it's still sound in ten years is the waterproofing and the substrate underneath — the part you can't see once the tile is on, and the part worth asking every bidder about.
Tile in a bathroom is a decorative surface. Water finds the smallest defect in the layer beneath it. If the waterproofing was skipped or done with the wrong product, your beautiful shower is going to rot studs, drop mold onto the room below, and be a full re-do in three to seven years.
We use Schluter Kerdi (sheet membrane), Wedi board, or liquid-applied waterproofing — depending on the substrate and the shower design. We never rely on "cement board is water-resistant" or the old plastic-pan-with-a-mud-bed approach. That's a bar we set for ourselves, not an upsell.
Tile pricing is mostly about area and complexity — how much surface, how hard it is to set, and how much prep sits underneath. What moves it:
Every quote is fixed and itemized after a free in-home visit.
A bathroom floor is typically two to three days. A shower surround is three to five days including waterproofing cure time. A full custom-tile walk-in shower is five to eight days.
Older Uptown and Wynnton bathrooms often have salt-glazed original tile you may want to keep — we work around it, or match it with modern reproductions. Slab-on-grade homes in Midland and North Columbus need proper crack-isolation membrane under the tile so the floor doesn't crack when the slab moves seasonally. It's an inexpensive material line most contractors skip; we don't.
"Tile installers near me" is a search with a trap inside it. Tile is the one part of a bathroom where everything you can see is finished by somebody whose real skill lives in a layer you will never look at again. Two installers can show you a photograph of the same herringbone shower wall, and one of those showers will be open studs in five years. The questions below separate them, and every one can be asked on the phone before anybody comes out to measure.
| Ask this | What a real answer sounds like | Why it separates them |
|---|---|---|
| "What waterproofing goes behind the tile — by name?" | A named product and a method: Kerdi sheet membrane, Wedi or Kerdi-Board foam panels, or a liquid membrane such as RedGard or HydroBan applied over cement backer board. | Cement backer board is water-resistant, not waterproof. An installer who answers "cement board" and stops has named the substrate and skipped the question. |
| "Can I see it before the tile covers it?" | Yes — a photo of the finished membrane, and of the corners and the drain, on the day it goes in. | Waterproofing is the only part of a bathroom that cannot be checked after handover. Once tile is on, nobody can tell from the outside what is underneath it. |
| "How are the corners and the wall-to-floor joint filled?" | Silicone in every change of plane. Grout only in the flat field. | Grout is rigid and a house moves. Grout packed into a corner cracks within a season or two, and that crack is where the water starts. |
| "The floor is on a slab. What goes under the tile?" | A crack-isolation membrane, over the slab, under the mortar. | Slab-on-grade homes around Midland, North Columbus and Fortson shift with the clay through the year. With nothing isolating it, the slab's next hairline crack telegraphs straight up through the tile. |
| "Do you set large-format tile, and how flat does the wall have to be first?" | An answer about flattening the substrate before a single tile is buttered. | Tile at 24x24 and up turns every hump in a wall into a lipped edge you can catch a fingernail on. Flattening is unglamorous prep; the installers who skip it blame the tile. |
| "Will you take tile-only work, or a repair to a shower somebody else built?" | A plain yes or no, before the visit is booked. | A lot of remodeling companies set tile only inside a whole-bathroom job. If a three-year-old shower is staining the ceiling below it, you need somebody willing to open it back up. |
Most people asking that assume the answer is yes and plan to use it as their screening test. In Georgia it is not that simple, and knowing why changes how you hire. Tile is one of the trades the Georgia Secretary of State recognizes as a traditional specialty contractor — exempt, under O.C.G.A. § 43-41-17, from the residential and general contractor license. There is no state tile license and no state tile exam to check.
| The job in front of you | What Georgia actually requires | What to check instead |
|---|---|---|
| Tile only — a shower surround, a bathroom floor, a backsplash | No state residential or general contractor license. Tile sits on the Secretary of State's traditional specialty list, exempt under § 43-41-17. | A license number is not the test here, because the state never set one. The waterproofing questions above are the test, along with general liability insurance confirmed in writing. |
| Tile work that also moves a drain, a supply line or a circuit | Plumbing and electrical are licensed separately by the state at any price. The specialty exemption does not reach into them. | Ask by name who is moving the drain or running the circuit, and whether that person holds their own state license. "My guy handles it" is not an answer. |
| Tile as part of a full bathroom remodel | A state residential or general contractor license once labor and materials pass $2,500. | Ask for the license number and look it up on the Secretary of State's site before anything is signed. It takes about a minute and it is public. |
| An exempt tile contractor doing a little adjacent carpentry — a shower bench, a curb, blocking | Allowed. The statute lets an exempt specialty contractor do work incidental to their own trade, up to the greater of $10,000 or 25 percent of the contract value. | Useful to know so a reasonable answer does not sound alarming — and so you can tell when a "tile job" has quietly grown into a remodel that needed a licensed contractor. |
Read that first row again, because it is the whole point. Georgia has done none of the vetting for you on a tile-only job — no exam, no board, no number to look up. That is exactly why the membrane questions above matter more here than a license would: on this trade, the homeowner is the entire screening process, and the layer that decides whether the shower survives is the one nobody can inspect after the tile goes on.
Yes. Plenty of homeowners find the tile first — a closeout at a distributor, a pattern from a box store, a stone slab they fell for on a weekend. When you supply the material, the labor is quoted on its own so you can see exactly what the setting work costs against what the tile cost. One caution worth hearing before you buy: order more than the square footage says. Cuts, breakage and a bad box are normal, and a dye lot ordered three weeks later rarely matches the one on your wall.
The products decide that, not the calendar. Mortar has to cure before grout goes in, grout has to cure before it meets water, and any sealer on top of that has its own wait — each one printed on its own bag or bottle. A shower that gets rinsed on schedule instead of when the label says is a shower with a haze in the grout and a weak bond under the tile, and neither is fixable without taking it apart. The cure time is quoted with the job, so nobody has to guess at the end of it.
Usually not. Cracking that follows a corner, or the line where the wall meets the floor, is almost always the sign that a rigid material was packed into a joint that was always going to move. Regrouting it puts the same rigid material back in the same moving joint and it reopens. The repair is to cut the joint out and fill it with silicone. Cracking that wanders across a flat floor instead is a different story — that one usually starts in the slab underneath, and re-tiling over it without a crack-isolation layer buys you the same crack again.
Often, and it is worth asking before anyone quotes you on ripping it out. Salt-glazed original wall tile and small hex floors in the older parts of Columbus are frequently in better condition than the fixtures around them, and they are the reason those bathrooms have any character at all. There are three honest routes: work around what is sound and replace only the failed area, match it with a modern reproduction where a run has to be broken into, or take it out on purpose because the layout is changing anyway. What should not happen is losing it by default because demolition was simpler to price.
A tile installer sets tile: substrate, waterproofing, layout, setting, grout. A bathroom remodeler runs the whole job — the demolition, the plumbing and electrical work, the vanity and the glass — and the tile is one trade inside it. Which one you want depends on how much of the room is moving. If everything else stays put and the shower needs re-tiling, the tile work is the job. If the tub is becoming a shower or the layout changes, the tile is one stage of a remodel and hiring it separately leaves you coordinating trades yourself.
See walk-in shower installation, full bathroom remodel, or tub-to-shower conversion.
Free in-home visit. Fixed written quote, no obligation.
