How to Fix a Loose Tile

You know what's not a good look? That. You know it's not that hard to fix? Yeah.

All right, so today on Quick Fix, we’re going to replace a broken bathroom tile. This is the tile in question. It snapped right off. Now, this tile is 50-years old. It was put in here when the bathroom was built. So, you can try and find a replacement tile, but you're never going to match the color exactly. So instead, we’re just going to make this one work. It’s really simple to do.

First step, you got to clean this up area, not too bad right there. It’s pretty cleaned up a little bit area here, but really the real problem is you're going to get all these mortar off the back of this. Otherwise, it’s not going to sit right. So all right, I'm going to chisel this down here on the floor because I don’t want to break any more tiles. So, this is the really exciting part. I'm just going to get this lower lift off here. For our purposes, that pretty much knocks it down enough for me because if you look at a flat like that, you can see it’s pretty flat. We’re not going to get this all off. We don’t have to get it all off. I'm going to get a little bit of the grout here on the outside now. This stuff should come right off.

All right, I didn’t want this part to come off. This is a grout. This is tile. That’s going to make the fit really on fit like it was. Oh well, I had just a lesson. Be careful with the grout. There we go. All right, we’ve got the pieces all cleaned up. I just got to clean up this area and it’s really not much here. It just a little bit of the grout I was showing you. You got to be super careful around this part here. I don’t want to knock this tile loose. I just want to get a little bit of that grout off. It’s coming off nice, nice and easy.

Yes, so as you can see, it looks really good in here. We just got to dry and fit it to make sure it fits, hence the name, broken piece. It was still good when the piece wasn’t broken. All right, so that’s what it looks like, cool. But now is the moment of truth. There’s no more messing around here. We’re going to put the liquid nails on. I'm just going to put a little bit on both sides here, little dollops of it. Hold it on here and we’re just going to give it a good push, all right. We got a little bit of time before it sets because it already starts to hold it pretty tightly. So, a little bit more there, a little bit more there. You don’t have to do here, just tape this. This is blue painters tape. This stuff is gold. It sticks very well but it easily comes off. This tape is going to hold it exactly in place where we want it. So, that’s why we’re doing this.

I'm going to put just a couple more piece of tape on here to hold it. And then, this is really easy. All we do is wait an hour and come back. And now, it’s just like trimming a cake, okay. So basically, I just take this and I'm going to fill them here. But remember this part? The little part that I broke, the one I'm not really happy about. Well, we save that part. So, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to start with that part. I'm going to put just a little bit of caulking down in there and now, I'm going to try to do my little -- I love puzzles. So, we’ll see what we can do here. I'm going to get that in. Yeah, that’s not the best little fit but there we go. You don’t really have to worry about being really clean on this part because what you do is use your finger and you clean it, walk right up. I suggest cleaning as you go, have some towels. Well, a damn towel actually works pretty well. It’s all about smoothing it out with your finger and filling in those little holes.

The caulking that we’re using is grout. It’s basically your safety net. I mean its not going to be a perfect fit in here but with the caulking, you’ll never going to know that. It’s going to look perfect. And everyone’s going to say, “Wow, that’s so cool! Who’s your tile guy?” And you're going to laugh because obviously, you don’t have a tile guy. You're the tile guy. And then you just wet your finger and you're going to just smooth it right on down the line. If you look at it, I mean that’s good. We consider what you have before, all you have was a big piece of wood and an old broken tile. Now, we got these four tiles, a little piece there and a little piece, I'm going to be honest. I'm not going to lie to you guys. It doesn’t look perfect but it doesn’t look terrible. And that will definitely work. I don’t think the wife is going to notice this. So perfect, that’s it. You fixed the bathroom tile. You are not going to be able to find one of these 50-year old tiles anyway, so you took the broken you had, you put it on here and it didn’t take you that long, did it? No, I don’t think so.