ᐅ Crack between the tiles and the baseboard?

Hello everyone,

Our house is currently at the shell stage, with the roof and windows installed. We plan to tile all the floors.

What would you recommend for the baseboards—tiles as well (we would cut and have the edges sanded) or (white painted) wooden baseboards? Visually, I can imagine both options.

I’ve heard that the tiled floor (or the wall??) still needs to dry or settle, so if you install the baseboards too soon, a crack, gap, or separation can appear between the floor and the baseboard.

Can the choice of material encourage or prevent this?

You can’t really postpone installing the baseboards for too long... Then the tiler would have to come back a second time, and wouldn’t that interfere with the interior plaster? Isn’t a tiled baseboard usually installed before the interior plaster? Would a wooden baseboard be screwed onto the interior plaster?

As you can see, I’m a bit confused, and my goal is to avoid any gap between the floor tiles and the baseboard.

Thanks and best regards

The usual sequence is:

Interior plaster => screed => heating installation => let everything dry properly => lay the tiles

For baseboards, we chose matching "baseboard tiles" to go with the floor tiles we selected.

With tiles, there's usually a silicone joint between the tile and the baseboard to ensure a neat finish. However, this often cracks if applied immediately.

I can't really imagine wooden baseboards on most tiles. We have white wooden baseboards with our parquet flooring, which works well (wood to wood).

Hello, thanks to both of you.
So the interior plaster goes on first.

What exactly shrinks to cause the joint to crack? The screed?

Does that mean you have to wait longer after the screed before installing the tiles and baseboard?
Or do you actually install the tiles first and then wait for weeks before adding the baseboard?

Best regards

After installing the screed, you first have to wait until it is dry enough. The tiler only installs the floor tiles once the residual moisture is below a certain level.

In our case, the tiler only laid the floor tiles after everything was truly dry enough, and then installed the skirting boards immediately afterward.

Two weeks earlier, the tiler had left without completing the work because the residual moisture measurement showed that the screed was still too wet.

Ah, thank you. So, you need to wait until the screed definitely has a sufficiently low residual moisture level. And you didn’t get any cracks this way, right?