This house is quite old, about 1880. The front hallway is tiled in a repeating mosaic pattern with thick quarry-like tiles, some postage stamp size (pre barcode) and some fancy shapes maybe 6" on a side.
It's probably lime based concrete over rubble underneath with a weaker lime mortar securing the tiles, except where some have been secured with more modern adhesive. It's very nice, but with years and some ground heave many of them are cracked, and more importantly, the front door would only open half way before grounding.
I decided that the best thing to do would be to remove a section of tiling next to the door. There's no way I could re-lay these, there's no discernible grout line between tiles and lots are broken. The pattern sort of dictated that I remove about 105 cm in from the door.
So I did, and removed some of the underlying material. I then used self levelling (really self smoothing) compound in a couple of layers (and some cement-based tile adhesive I had knocking around [1]) so that I can lay some coir matting on this. Looks good so far but...
Do I need to seal this in some way? If so, could I used any old spare paint [1]? Also, I need a threshold strip to cover the interface, but where can I get some 106 cm wide without buying 2.4 m [1]?
[1] I'm a tightarse.