Something interesting .. Tiled Stairs (Pic)

Flt_Simulation · 06-22-2012, 10:16 PM

FYI ...

I am having my garage floor here in Florida tiled in 20" x 20" porcelain tiles right now.

Since I have flooring on my mind now, and this is the "flooring forum", I thought I would share with you some photos of my other house in the Philippines.

I have a custom built cement staircase that leads up to the 2nd floor. The wood steps are attached to the cement. Well, after about a year in this house, the clear finish on the wood steps was starting to get scratched up. As I stated before, the actual straircase is made of cement, and the wood steps are screwed into that cement. Anyway, my problem was with the wood steps.

Here was the "fix" .... I really don't think I have seen this done before, but it solved the wear problems from walking up and down wood steps ... and I think it looks very nice too.

My tile guy cut and installed ceramic tile to be installed over the wood steps.

Here are some photos of the tile applied directly to the wood steps (I thought this was a great idea myself).

What do ya think?

(he also installed some kind of a plastic 'wear' strip on the nose of the tiles that you can see in the photos. This wear strip has about a 1" lip that sticks underneath tile so it does not come loose)

I don't know what type of adhesive he used to fix the tiles to the wood steps, but whatever it is ... it ain't coming loose in my lifetime.

Flt_Simulation · 06-22-2012, 10:36 PM

BTW ... here is a couple of photos of this cement staircase when the Filipino workers were making it .... Pretty neat engineering

cleveman · 06-23-2012, 12:06 AM

Looks nice to me. I'm impressed with the quality if work there.

I've tiled two staircases myself. They were both built with 2x8 risers and 2x10 treads glued and screwed to stringers on framed walls, then tilebacker mortared to the framing and tile on that.

The tile on the wood is questionable versus on the concrete (not cement, Jethro) directly, but time will tell if it moves or not. If you have problems with the joints cracking, you could always caulk them with the sanded caulk. I was caulking most of the joints (change in plane) on my staircases anyway.

I've seen a lot of concrete staircases like that being built in Turkey as well. I'm glad to see you have a railing on yours.

Bonzai · 06-23-2012, 12:21 AM

I'm glad to see they used only the best 'slightly used' 2x4's for framing up that staircase concrete pour

Only kidding ... seems to work. Note sure about the feel of a double nose on the stairs but the tile guy has certainly done a very neat job.