From the Blog · Tile Installation
What is lippage — and how do you avoid it?
Lippage is the step or lip between the edge of one tile and the one next to it — the ridge you feel with a fingertip or catch a toe on. A small amount is unavoidable because most tiles have a slight bow, but visible, feel-able lippage is a workmanship problem: it comes from an uneven bed, the wrong trowel, or tiles never checked as they were laid. Under ANSI A108 standards, the allowance is about 1/32 of an inch beyond a tile's own natural warpage — anything you can feel as a sharp lip has usually been laid, not manufactured, that way.
How to check for lippage
Run your fingertips across the joints, then lay a straightedge or a long spirit level across the floor and look for rocking or light gaps under it. On floors, drag a coin across the joints — if it catches hard and jumps, the lip is real. Check in daylight raking across the surface if you can: low sun through a patio door shows every lip that flat ceiling light hides.
What actually causes it
An uneven substrate. Tile follows the floor under it. A dip or hump in the slab or subfloor becomes a lip at the joint unless the floor is flattened first. The wrong trowel and thinset. Too small a notch starves large tiles of bedding; ridges that are never collapsed leave one corner floating high. Large-format tile needs a bigger notch and back-buttering. Warped tile. Long plank and large-format tiles bow slightly in the middle by design tolerance — laid in a straight stack bond, bow meets bow and the lip doubles. A one-third offset instead of half offset keeps bows from stacking. Nobody checked. Lippage is cheapest in the first ten minutes: lift, adjust, re-bed. Once the thinset has gone off, the fix is demolition.
How a careful installer avoids it
Flatten the substrate before a single tile is opened — self-leveller or grinding, not extra thinset dollops. Match the trowel notch to the tile size, back-butter large format, and collapse the ridges by sliding each tile perpendicular to them. Use a levelling-clip system on large-format work to hold edges flush while the bed cures, and check with a straightedge as you go, row by row. None of this is exotic. It is just slower than slapping tile down — and it is the whole difference.
Can lippage be fixed afterwards?
Sometimes, honestly no. A single high tile can occasionally be lifted and re-bedded within the first day; after curing, the realistic fix is removing the offending tiles and relaying that section — grout grinding and 'feathering' tricks just move the problem and look worse. That is why the question to ask any tiler before they start is not the day rate — it is how they prep the floor and whether they use levelling clips on big tile.
The short version
Lippage is a lip between neighbouring tiles. A whisper of it comes from the tile itself; a lip you can feel comes from the prep, the bedding, or nobody checking. If the edges of a floor you are paying for catch your fingertips, say so while the thinset is still wet. Call The British Remodeler at 719-521-8312 for tile work laid flat, first time.
Tiles catching your toes?
Text a photo of the floor to 719-521-8312 and get a straight answer on whether it can be laid flat — and what it takes if it can't.