Colored Sand Floor Over Existing Tiles

Product overview

A coloured sand floor — coloured aggregate bound in epoxy, worked across the surface and sealed under a gloss wear coat — specified against the one substrate question that comes up more often than any other on this material: the floor is already tiled, and nobody wants it lifted. The material is the same coloured sand we fit indoors, in kitchens and in bathrooms. What is specified differently here is everything underneath it: the glaze has to be opened to a mechanical key, the grout grid has to be filled so it does not print through a 2 mm film, and the tile bed has to be proven bonded before anything is mixed.

Coverage, thickness, pack size, finish and the colour count are on the Technical Specs tab, and so is the list of figures we do not hold. Where a cell is empty it is empty because nobody has measured it, not because the data is confidential.

How this differs from our other over-tile floor

We already sell a resin floor laid over existing tiles, and people mix the two up, so the line is worth drawing before anything else. That one is a build-up product: a thicker flooded system whose job is to level an uneven floor, mask a deeply incised grout grid and re-establish a surface that has lost its fall. It carries a matched hardener ratio and a small range of greys, and its technical figures are ours because we test that build.

This one is a decorative coloured sand coat at a thin build. It will not level a floor, it will not hide a stepped tile bed, and it will not bridge a joint that moves. What it does is give a tiled room a seamless, coloured, speckled stone surface with no grout to scrub. If the existing floor is flat and sound and what you want is the appearance and the wipeability, this is the right page. If the floor is uneven, hollow in places or needs its fall re-made, the other page is the right one and we would rather redirect you than sell you the wrong film.

What has to be true about the tile first

A thin decorative film records whatever is under it, permanently. So the tile is inspected as a structural question rather than a cosmetic one, and three findings stop the job:

• A debonded bed. Tap across the whole floor, including behind and under units and appliances, which get inspected exactly once. Tiles that sound hollow are lifted, not coated. A film over a hollow tile will bridge it for a season and then show the outline of every one.
• Movement. Where the floor has movement joints, or where the tile has cracked along a line that repeats across the room, the slab is moving. A thin resin film is not a crack bridge and it will open exactly above that line.
• A glaze that will not take a key. The bond depends on scarifying the glaze. Some dense porcelain glazes resist normal preparation, and on those the honest answer is a different build or a different floor.

Where a floor has been wet under an appliance or a waste for years, that is dealt with before anything is coated. A film laid over a damp make-up will not stop it and will hide it longer.

Grout lines, and what a thin coat does about them

This is the failure people worry about, and it is a real one. Grout is softer than tile and it sinks, so a thin coat applied straight onto an old grout grid will print the grid through within months, as a faint line of slightly lighter rectangles across the room.

So the grout is filled and the floor is skimmed before the coloured sand goes on, and that is a preparation step rather than an upsell. It also sets the honest expectation: a skimmed floor over tile reads flat. A floor with decades of lippage and a stepped bed will still show its rhythm under a gloss finish in low raking light. We can improve how a tired tiled floor looks. We cannot turn it into a poured slab.

Water, and the boundary this floor does not cross

A decorative resin floor is not a waterproofing layer. It is a continuous wearing surface, so it will not let a spill through the way an open grout grid can, but it does not hold back water travelling underneath and it is not a tanking system. Listings for this class of product very often carry a waterproof claim; we do not repeat it, because the test that would support it is a test on a build-up and a tanking detail, not on a decorative film.

In a bathroom or a wet room this coating goes over a properly tanked floor, and the tanking is a separate layer with its own detail at the waste and the upstand. Where a room has a shower and a linear drain, the specification is on the bathroom and wet room coloured sand page, which leaves the aggregate open at the shower and closes it elsewhere.

Where it goes

• Interior floors being refurbished without demolition — the commercial reason for this product almost every time: no skip, no dust, no re-screeding, and the room is back in use in days rather than after a construction break.
• Corridors, offices, showrooms and retail — the twelve colour images on this page are mostly commercial interiors because that is where the tile-over case is most common, and a seamless field with no threshold strips is what those rooms ask for.
• Kitchens and utility rooms over sound tile — where the cleaning routine is a neutral detergent rather than a degreaser. The kitchen page explains why that one distinction decides the build.
• Living rooms and bedrooms — carried through from the hallway without a strip of a different colour in the doorway, since the palette is shared across the interior, kitchen and bathroom builds.

It is not an external floor. The data sheet behind this material says interior and exterior floors, and we do not carry that sentence: an aromatic epoxy film ambers in direct sun, and the outdoor build differs in the one layer that matters, which is a wear coat chosen for weathering. For a terrace, a balcony or an exposed path the specification is outdoor colored sand.

Twelve fixed colours

The palette is the twelve factory-blended colours listed on this page — the same twelve as our interior, kitchen and bathroom builds, which is what lets a renovated room run into the rooms around it. The aggregate is blended into the pack rather than tinted on site, so a repeat order matches the first one. This product is not part of the custom matching programme; where a project needs a specific RAL or Pantone reference, that is a different build from our colour-matched range.

Two honest notes on the pictures. The twelve floor images are indicative renders, not photographed projects, and they are twelve different rooms rather than one room re-coloured — so read them as a guide to hue and not as a prediction of how a specific room will look. Pale colours in a bright room read lighter than the chip suggests, and Multi-Colour lays down closer to a grey blend than the name implies.

What we do not publish

Hardness, abrasion loss, adhesion, slip classification, VOC, thermal behaviour and chemical resistance are absent from the technical table because we have not tested this build. None of them is carried over from a similar product, and a supplier listing is not a test report. The listing behind this one gives two different hardener ratios for the same pack, and its own colour table lists fewer colours than its colour cards show — those are precisely the figures we will not repeat.

What we do publish — coverage, thickness, pack size, finish and the colour count — is partner factory data for the same material, marked so you can see which numbers are ours and which are theirs. Coverage is the one cell here that is not shared with our interior page: their usage table gives a rate per substrate rather than one per product, so a tiled bed and a normal concrete floor are different rows of it, and both figures sit on the Technical Specs tab. Drying and cure timings live on the Technical Specs tab rather than being restated here, because a figure that appears twice can drift apart.