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TRIM Tasmania – Launceston, Hobart & Devonport
Andrew Golle leads the TRIM team with 28 years of experience, servicing Launceston, Hobart, and Devonport. As a member of several industry bodies, Andrew provides comprehensive tile repairs, waterproofing services, inspections, expert reports, and consultancy. He also offers training across Australia on waterproofing and tiling standards.
Tasmania Licence Number: CC5464H
Contact: Mr Andrew Golle
Our Services and Solutions
In Tasmania, the natural settling of foundations, combined with the cooler climate and moisture variations, can cause loose floor tiles. TRIM’s tile reglue injection method offers an efficient, cost-effective solution to restore your damaged tiles securely without removal. Whether it’s in your bathroom, kitchen, or living areas, we’ll ensure your tiles are restored quickly, making them safe to walk on again.
TRIM’s repairs are permanent, saving you the cost and hassle of full tile replacement, with minimal disruption—your floors will be ready to use in just a few hours.
Loose floor tiles
What is a loose floor tile?
You feel this one before you hear it. The tile rocks slightly underfoot, or a group of tiles creaks and shifts as you cross the room. Grout lines crack and crumble, and in bad cases the tile lifts enough to catch a toe. It has lost its adhesive contact and is being held in place by the grout around it.
How do floor tiles come loose in Tasmania?
Old buildings and cold ground, in combination. Hobart and Launceston have a great deal of nineteenth and early twentieth century housing, much of it with timber floors over ventilated subfloors, and those floors move with moisture and with age. Tiling laid over them during a renovation is fixed to a substrate that was never intended to be rigid.
Damp is the other half of it. Tasmania’s winters are long and wet, subfloor ventilation is often marginal in older homes, and moisture that sits under a floor for months keeps the adhesive bed damp. Adhesive that never fully dries out does not hold indefinitely.
Should I replace loose floor tiles or repair them?
What decides it for most people is whether the tiles are still available. Replacement is rarely partial, because a tile from the same range years later will almost never match, so a handful of loose tiles becomes the whole floor. Tile repair treats them individually and keeps the floor you have, at a fraction of the cost and in a day rather than a week.
How does TRIM repair loose floor tiles?
The method is built around not moving you out. Injectabond adhesive goes into the void beneath each affected tile through small access points, re-bonding it in place with no removal, no dust and no skip bin in the driveway. Furniture goes back the same day, backed by a 10 year workmanship guarantee, a 10 year adhesive and product warranty, and a method with a 25 year tested service life behind it.
Peaked and tented tiles
What are peaked or tented tiles?
This is the failure that announces itself. Tiles lift away from the floor and meet in a ridge, sometimes overnight, occasionally with a crack loud enough to wake the house. The tiles have not shrunk or broken. The floor has run out of room, and the pressure has nowhere left to go but up.
Why do tiles peak and tent in Tasmania?
It happens less often here than in the north, and when it does the mechanism is usually moisture rather than heat. A slab that has absorbed water through a long wet winter expands, and a tiled surface fixed tightly to it with inadequate perimeter joints has nowhere to accommodate that growth.
Indoor heating provides the thermal version. A tiled floor over a heating system, or in a room that is warmed hard through winter and left cold the rest of the time, goes through a genuine expansion cycle even while the outside stays cool. Sunrooms and north-facing glazed rooms can also reach surprisingly high surface temperatures on clear days, and a floor laid without movement provision will respond to that the same way it would anywhere else.
Should peaked tiles be replaced or repaired?
Tile repair is the better answer, provided the pressure is dealt with and not just the tiles. Replacement is the expensive route to the same place: full demolition, the whole floor out because a partial job will never match, and no guarantee against it happening again. TRIM treats the cause rather than the symptom, without pulling your floor up.
How does TRIM repair peaked and tented tiles?
The pressure comes out first. TRIM relieves the built-up compressive force in the floor, then re-bonds the affected tiles with Injectabond adhesive injected into the void beneath them, restoring a level, secure surface. Where the original floor lacked adequate movement provision, that is addressed as part of the repair. Floors and walls alike, no demolition, and a 10 year workmanship guarantee alongside a 10 year adhesive and product warranty.
Drummy tiles
What is a drummy tile?
Tap one with a coin and you will hear it straight away. A properly bonded tile returns a solid, dull note. A drummy tile sounds hollow, because the adhesive beneath it has released and left an air pocket. The tile itself is usually undamaged. It simply is not attached to anything anymore.
How do drummy tiles occur in Tasmania?
Cold is the variable that sets Tasmania apart. Overnight temperatures drop well below what mainland floors experience, and any moisture present in a substrate or in the void beneath a tile expands as it approaches freezing. Repeated over a winter, that expansion works at the bond from the inside.
The daily contrast is just as important. A heated living space sitting above an unheated or poorly insulated subfloor creates a substantial temperature difference across a very short distance, and the tile and its substrate respond to that difference at different rates. Outdoor and unheated areas, including garages, entries and sunrooms, tend to show the problem first.
Should I replace drummy tiles or repair them?
The problem is the bond and not the tile, which makes drummy tiles the best case there is for repair. Replacement means demolition, dust through the house, days without the room, and the near certainty that your original tiles are discontinued and the new ones will not match. Tile repair addresses the actual fault and keeps the floor you already have.
How does TRIM repair drummy tiles?
TRIM sounds the floor first to map exactly where the voids sit, then injects Injectabond adhesive through discreet access points, restoring up to 90% contact coverage beneath the tile. Nothing is removed and there is no demolition. Your floor takes foot traffic within hours, covered by a 10 year workmanship guarantee and a 10 year adhesive and product warranty.
Loose wall tiles
What is a loose wall tile?
A debonded wall tile sounds hollow when tapped and will often move slightly under hand pressure. In bathrooms the grout usually goes first: hairline cracks appear, then grout starts falling out, then a tile shifts. The real concern is what gets behind it, because water reaching the substrate through a failed tile line will find the waterproofing membrane.
How do wall tiles come loose in Tasmania?
The temperature difference across a bathroom wall is the key factor. A hot shower in a cold house creates a steep gradient between the warm, wet inside face of the wall and the cold structure behind it, and that is close to ideal conditions for condensation forming where it cannot be seen.
Older homes make it worse. Solid masonry and uninsulated timber-framed walls both allow the cold outside to reach the back of the tile, and where extraction is poor or absent the moisture has nowhere to go. Over successive winters the substrate stays damp, the adhesive weakens, and the tiles start to sound hollow.
Should loose wall tiles be replaced or repaired?
The gap between the two options is wider on walls than it is on floors. Replacing wall tiles means removing shower screens, taps and vanities, cutting out the old surface, and very often disturbing waterproofing that is currently doing its job. That turns a tile problem into a bathroom renovation. Tile repair leaves all of it in place.
How does TRIM repair loose wall tiles?
Injectabond adhesive is injected through discreet access points into the void behind the affected tiles, drawing them back to the substrate. No fixtures come off the wall, no tiles come out, and there is no dust through the house. Most bathrooms are back in service the next day, under a 10 year workmanship guarantee and a 10 year adhesive and product warranty.
Spot bonded tiles
What does spot bonded mean?
Spot bonding is an installation shortcut. Instead of trowelling adhesive across the full back of the tile, the installer places five dabs and presses the tile onto them, leaving most of it suspended over empty space. The tile ends up with a fraction of the bond strength it should have, which is why Australian Standards call for near-full adhesive coverage.
Why do spot bonded tiles fail in Tasmania?
The void behind a spot bonded tile is the problem, and in a cold, damp climate it is a worse problem than elsewhere.
That empty space collects moisture and holds it, and unlike a mainland cavity it does not get a hot dry season to clear it out. Through winter it can stay damp for months at a time while temperatures drop low enough for that moisture to expand. The result is a bond being degraded chemically and worked at physically at the same time, around dabs of adhesive that were never sufficient to begin with. Failures tend to appear in the coldest and dampest parts of a building first, which is usually bathrooms, laundries and entries.
Should spot bonded tiles be replaced or repaired?
Replacement is what most people get quoted first, and it is the wrong starting point, because the tiles themselves are perfectly good. The installation failed, not the product. Tile repair puts the missing adhesive where it should have gone originally, without demolishing a floor that only needs bonding.
How does TRIM repair spot bonded tiles?
The voids left by the original installation get filled. Injectabond adhesive goes into the empty space behind each tile, building coverage back up to as much as 90% contact with the substrate and giving the tile the bond strength it should have had from day one. Nothing is lifted or removed, and the result is backed by a 10 year workmanship guarantee, a 10 year adhesive and product warranty, and a method with a 25 year tested service life.
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