When it comes to building a house or any buildings flooring occupies an important part of it. Tiles are used widely as a flooring solution in majority of the cases. We spend a lot of money on purchasing tiles for our house. It varies with color, design , durability and quality. What if we can make home made tiles for our purposes?
Anything that can be made, can be made using concrete. If you have sand and cement you can make your own tiles at your home according to your choice and purpose. A concrete tile can be made using different ways. It requirements are very simple. You can create concrete tiles of your wish at home under low cost and can be used for your yard, foreground or backyard.
Mainly there are three basic methods to make concrete tiles. You can make moulds and pour concrete into your desired size and shape. You can also add color to it if you prefer.You can use self leveling concrete or GFRC ( Glass fiber Reinforced Concrete in Moulds) , which is a light weight product and very durable. It helps to get the tile integrally colored or stained and dyed.Finally you can use overlays and create the look of tile with saw cuts.
Here is explaining a simple and easy way to mould concrete tiles at home using sand and cement. The ratio of the sand and cement should be 3:1. If you are measuring 3 pots of sand then you have to mix 1 pot of cement to it. Like ways you can prepare the quantity of your need by maintaining the perfect ratio. You can also add oxide colors of your choice.
To make the concrete mixture, blend the cement and sand together well and make it a thick paste using sufficient water. It shouldn’t be very loosy. It shouldn’t be much hard too. Maintain a balance of its consistency. The colors are not directly added to the mixture. To prepare the color solution mix the color with cement in another pot and stir well until it blend together properly.
Now clean the area where you have to do the tiling. Moulders are available in online and offline markets. A moulder have two sides. One side is thicker than the other is thinner. The thinner side have to go to the bottom touching the surface of tiling and the thicker side should be according to that which we can see. This helps for the gentle removal after the tile got set.
After you placed the moulder on the desired area, fill the moulder with 3/4th of the moulder with cement and 1/4th area in the top with the color mixture. These are done through seperate steps and not all together. Now let the tile to rest for some time until it get set. After it got well set remove the moulder gently from the tiles.
Now keep the moulder tightly closer to the made tiles and fill it with the cement mixture and color mixture. Continue this process until all the desired area is covered with tiling. The color mixture should be at a loose consistency so that it can be poured and spread above the concrete mixture. It should not be very thick.
A main advantage of this homemade tiles is that it is very economy friendly and budget friendly. If we plan to tile our yard or the outside area, we don’t have to spend a lot of money for the purchase of the tiles and for labour cost. If we have minimal raw materials we can do it by ourselves with a good finishing.
