How I Painted and Stenciled My Tile Floor

Painted and Stenciled Floor Tile

Currently I am in the process of finding a renovation company to renovate our master bathroom. Which is a process in itself! Until then I decided to paint and stencil my master bathroom tile floor. Yup, you heard me right. I painted and stenciled my master bathroom tile floor. I always wanted to try painting tile but was too nervous. Since this floor is being removed I thought why not? If I mess it up it is being taken out anyway! It turned out great and I am thinking, why didn’t I do this sooner?

This tile floor was a mess. I am pretty sure it was not installed by a professional. The tiles were not laid evenly. The grout lines were all different sizes and the grout was just piled up in the corners. Not to mention that the grout was just plain gross. Let me show you!

Time to Clean

As you can see in the picture above I have my trusty bottle of TSP handy. I sprayed the floors and let them sit for a while. Then I went back with a bucket of warm water, a scrub brush and a rag. I scrubbed them with the brush and then wiped them up with the rag. It really didn’t take that long. TSP is a miracle worker. In the pic below the clean tile is on the right. On a side note, why didn’t I really scrub these tiles sooner……..?

Time to Paint

Better, but still yucky. Time for the primer. I used my good old Zinser 123 and gave the bathroom floor two coats. I also painted around the gigantic bathtub.

Looks better already doesn’t it? After the two coats of primer I painted two coats of the same paint I used on my kitchen cabinets. It was the Benjamin Moore Advance in the color Simply White. After that was done it was time to use my snazzy stencil! I ordered it online from Cutting Edge Stencils. It is the Santa Ana tile stencil and I used Benjamin Moore Stonington Grey for the stencil color.

It is recommended to use a foam roller with the stencil. I tried it with a micro fiber roller at first and it didn’t work as well. The micro fiber roller caused a little too much bleeding underneath. The trick to the stenciling is to make sure that you do not have much paint on your roller at all. Use much less than you think! I used a piece of cardboard to roll my roller on to remove much of the excess paint. I also gave the back of the stencil a wipe with a damp rag before placing it back down to do the next one. Make sure you do every other square so you don’t smudge the one you just did. It dries very quickly so you can go back and do the skipped ones fairly soon. Oh, and make sure you do all of the whole tiles first! There is some cutting of the stencil involved too.

It’s looking pretty good right? To do around the toilet I just bent up my stencil and rolled it carefully up to the toilet. As you can see in the picture the stencil does not go right up to the toilet. If you wanted it to go up to the toilet you could either cut the stencil or use a small paintbrush to free hand the pattern right up to the toilet.

Next step is to cut your stencil. Don’t be scared! Start with the biggest tile that is not a whole tile. Cut your stencil to the correct size then stencil that partial tile. Keep on going making your stencil smaller and smaller to accommodate each size of tile. In the end this is what my stencil looked like. All in bits!

My stencil pattern on the floor definitely does not have clean crisp lines but I kind of like it that way. To me it is perfectly imperfect. If you want a clean crisp line you can go back over each tile with a paint brush and make each edge clean and crisp. I’ve seen it done on Pinterest! I definitely don’t have the patience to do that.

To finish it all off I put on two coats of Polycrylic to seal it. And there you have it, an amazing new floor for the cost of a little paint and the stencil (In my case I already had the paint). And of course your hard work. It is surprisingly more durable than I thought it would be. I thought for sure where the shower door dripped it would come off, but it is staying strong!

Thanks for stopping by to check out how I painted my ugly tile flooring. Here is a list of items used for this project.

1. 1. Foam roller
   2. Paint brush
   3. Paint tray
   4. Primer
   5. Base colour
   6. Stencil colour
   7. Stencil  – Link below but the price is not correct. I bought direct from Cutting Edge Stencils
   8. TSP
   9. Polycrylic

Click on the images below to shop related products.

Thanks for stopping by the blog today. You might also want to check out how I painted my vanity and my vanity counter top.

Have a great day!

Karla

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