Flooring Tile - 1st Time Tiler - Important questions...

Hi,

My first tile job... my hallway with 16"x16"x5/16" porcelain tiles. Since it's a hall, there's 5 adjacent hardwood floor rooms.

Questions:

The manufacturer is in Spain and doesn't respond to my questions on correct trowel, notches, etc. - any thoughts?

We don't want bulky oak threshold transitions between the oak floors and the tile hall. We hope to use the Schluter expansion joints. We're trying to figure the installed tile height to see if it will be close to the oak floor height. The tile is 5/16" and we're going to use 1/8" thick Schluter Ditra on the subfloor. Is there a way to predict the installed height w/thinset?

Also, some posts seem to suggest that 3/4" T&G is "thin" for supporting tiles. We have 2x10 16" OC 10 ft. long doug fir joists that will have a brand new single layer 3/4" T&G on them covered by Schluter Ditra. Is that solid enough?

Thanks guys!

That floor with the Ditra should be fine, just remember, those are the minimums, as for the 16" tile, you want nothing less than a 3/8" notched trowel and you should backbutter each tile with the flat side of the trowel before setting, you want 100% covergae with this size tile and for porcelain.:)

3/8" thinset should compress to around 1/8" after setting the tile in it, Ditra gets a 1/16" trowel for the thinset which will also compress around 1/2 of that.:)

Ditra gets a 1/16" trowel for the thinset...

Can you explain that please?
:confused:

To set it, here, read up, it's all here.:)

http://www.schluter.com/english/products/2002/sectionf/ditra/601-index.html