TILE AND GROUT REPAIRS
By
Carlo Americo Odella
Europamerican Tile & Marble

Your tile is cracked! Or perhaps both your tile and grout are cracked? What to do?

If the tile is glazed, either ceramic or porcelain, there probably isn’t much that you can do for a long-term permanent fix! The glaze is essentially melted glass and just as you can’t fix a cracked window pane, you really can’t repair the glaze and make it whole again. On a short term basis, you might get by with using some enamel paint or appliance or automobile “touch up” paint to paint over the crack. Eventually this will fail as the tile will continue to move and will no doubt re-crack again in the future. In a heavy traffic area the enamel will eventually wear away.

If the cracked tile is a quarry tile (the red clay tiles that you see in McDonalds or service stations) or a mosaic tile there really isn’t anything that you can do to repair the cracks. The tile is a solid “brick” of clay that has been pressed under extreme pressure and then baked under very high heat to make the tile. If it cracks there isn’t anything that you can do to force it back together! Mosaic tile are so small and hard that it is rare that they will exhibit cracks. What usually happens is the grout around the mosaic cracks and crumbles.

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