The great slate disaster

Our house is coming on slowly - of course improvements have been pretty much on hold in the summer holidays - but - we did pencil in some of the work on our bathroom which was completed a week ago.

Due to our circumstances still being rather unclear we scaled back our plans and decided to do the most pressing bits in the bathroom and have deferred the rest for a bit. The old bath is now gone!! (hooray hooray hooray!!!!) and moved, the new power shower is happily in situ and we've replaced the tiles.

In order to keep cost down we carefully selected the products we were going to use, Deva was the place where we sourced taps and shower valve at a fraction of the price of most we've seen. We used a local Plumbing shop for the bath, and went to Topps tiles for our tiles... sadly they had the oversized white tiles at a good price but not enough of small mosaic style slate tiles we'd rather set our hearts on for a border. (our one treat for the bathroom)

So we found and bought them at Homebase for £25.

Argh if only we hadn't!

We were away for a couple of days while the work was done, and returned to a half and half bathroom - half was gorgeous, the other still needs work. The kids have been constantly asking for baths now they can have them.

Within a day or so we started to notice an odd colour bleeding from one of the mosaic tiles, a sort of rust colourd trail began to appear down the grout and new white tile beneath it. Of course I wiped it away, but it came back - and still is. It's stained our brand new tile and the grout around it.

We were pretty cross, there had been no indication on the packaging that these tiles required any special treatment. So I went back to Homebase to get some sealer or something to stop it. I was passed from one inept assistant to another, on number 5 I was informed yes, they needed sealing and no, they didn't sell it!!!! I was feeling pretty steamed by this point, no offer of apology, assistance or compensation was mentioned. So they are going to get a written complaint with a picture of our ruined tiles, and I expect some sort of compensation.

Today Robin has finally found some of this mysterious sealer, it's cost us £20, and no doubt we'll have to pay to swap out the stained tiles. I do wish we'd opted for other tiles now, it would have been cheaper, and far less fuss and upset.