Tile – Bathroom, Kitchen or Entryway: Planning is the trick!

Setting accent tiles into a plain field can add a nice touch of playfulness.

Tile is one of those areas of home improvement where the devil is truly in the details. Now as it happens, I have one of those neighbors that is a home renovator’s dream – with a woodshop that would make your mouth water, this guy oozes remodeling tips and tricks. As luck would have it, he recently finished a tile job at a friend’s ski house and I asked him to share his lessons learned with the lot of us. In the interest of brevity – we’re going to focus on the actual planning of a tile job here and leave the tile setting for another day.  The following planning tips are written in Doug’s words (with just a little editing from yours truly).

There are a few rules of thumb that I have for planning a tile project that make things flow more smoothly when it comes to the real work. This post is slanted towards someone who will eventually lay their own tile, but some parts are also applicable to folks who are hiring a pro later in the process.

Step 1 Figure out what you want

This is the most important part, and surprisingly the one most people skip. Planning the job means knowing down to the last detail how you’ll deal with every little aspect of the project. The most important part is what the tile should look like and how it fits. If you’ve never done a tile project before, do what I did to learn: CHEAT! Magazines and books are an OK source of ideas, but I like going to open houses to get a better sense of how I might do a project. In a magazine, you only see a small part of the tile, and you can’t see the details that make a tile job really shine. If you visit a home in an upscale neighborhood, (during a Realtor’s Open House, for example) check out the details of the tile work.  Planning can take time; keep track of your research and findings by following the tips from our post on Staying Organized.

Before the remodel - while the color choices are clearly dated (don't you just love mid-century?), it's a good example of one type of border around a field. In this case, the field has been set on a 45 degree angle to create interest.

Step 2 Choose your look (and your tile size, texture & color)

Choose your overall look first. If you are doing a floor, figure out if you will be using large tile or small tile, and how they will be laid out. Small tile is great for bathrooms because the many grout lines create a surface that isn’t so slippery. If you’re using large tile on a floor, make sure the tile has a rough or irregular surface. Decide early on if you’ll be using natural stone, or a ceramic tile. It can be very dramatic to mix the two, but I’d recommend that you have at least one tile job under your belt before you try this. Truly natural stone (split slate, for example) varies in thickness and setting it to get a flat surface can be slightly tricky.

Step 3 Use Graph Paper to Map out the Project

Once you know your general look, map out your project. Use graph paper and draw the room to scale. Attention to detail matters here. Make note of every place where a cabinet juts out, where doorways are located, and where the tile transitions to another surface. You’ll want to know what you’re doing for each one of those. Will you carry the tile into adjacent closets? Check to see how far out-of-square your walls are. (Trust me; very few homes have perfectly parallel walls).

Step 4 lay out the tile

With map in hand, lay out the actual tile. I’ll usually draw lines on my map to show the center of each of the entryways and other key “view points” for the tile. Where the tile transitions to another surface, plan how you’ll deal with the transition. This is where it’s helpful to talk to a dedicated tile store instead of a big-box retailer. Dedicated tile stores have all the nice bits that make a job look really great. For example, a transition to carpet should be done with edging as shown in this link.

Step 5 don’t forget the grout

Planning and layout is critical with all the angles in a bathroom

While you’re laying out the tile, this is the time to think about the width of your grout lines. Travertine is often set with a 1/16″ grout line. Other products may have a 1/4″ grout line. What you choose to do depends on what looks best. Just make sure you account for the width of the lines when you’re laying out your field. If you’re doing a border, center the border within the main area. For example, if the hallway narrows slightly or has a bump-out, you don’t necessarily have to follow those walls exactly. The accent tile can be used to create the appearance of a straight wall even if they’re not quite straight.

Step 6 Purchase the Tile… and then buy some more!

Finally, plan how much tile you’ll need to purchase. ALWAYS over-buy the tile, and over-buy each type of tile you are going to use. If you have a field and a border, over-buy the field and over-buy the border. I’ve done jobs where we had 33 feet of border tile to cover 32 feet of space. It’s a nightmare to have to cut every single tile perfectly and have no room for error. Even if you could go back and get more, tile varies in color from batch to batch. I’ll talk about mixing tile in a later post, but if you go back to buy more “alpine white” tile, you may be surprised that the new box is visibly different from the boxes you already own. For ceramic tile, I like to have 15% extra if the job is over 100 square feet. For less than 100 square feet, make sure you have at least 10 extra pieces. Natural stone tends to be trickier to work with- it tends to break in unfortunate ways, so you’ll just need more backup.

Planning the job really is the most important step. Those details are the things that make a good job really stand out. Laying tile is fairly easy with the right tools. But that’s for another day.

Doug’s Hot Tips:

• Scope ideas at high-end homes and commercial properties – in other words snoop!
• Draw a detailed layout plan, showing the placement of every tile, the border, and how you’ll deal with the walls and transitions to other surfaces
• Buy more tile than you need. For jobs over 100 sq ft, 15% is OK. For jobs under 100 sq ft, buy at least 10 extra tiles, more if it is natural stone
• Try to find a neighborhood where you can live down the street from someone who really knows what they are talking about… oops that was my tip!

Technorati Tags: bathroom tile, cutting tile, entryway, front entry, granite countertops, hot tips, kitchen tile, laying tile, lessons learned, planning tile, remodel, tile, tile ideas