How to Pick the Right Floor Tile – My Big Mistake

How to Pick the Right Floor Tile – My Big Mistake

Well our master bathroom renovation is well under way. My beautiful painted and stenciled tile floor is all gone. Not to worry though it will be replaced with a beautiful white porcelain tile floor. Thank god that old shower and tub are gone!

Choosing the tile for this floor was a challenge! I knew I wanted it to be a white ‘marble look’ floor because of course real marble is just way to expensive.  I also wanted the tiles to be the large 24 X 24 tile. This kind of limited my choices because there are not too many tiles of this size and colour out there.

I began my search online of course. Lowes, Home Depot and Rona. I found a beautiful 24 X 24 inch white calacatta porcelain tile and to make it even better it was on sale! I thought to myself, wow that was easy! Not so fast. A major blunder was about to ensue. Here is the tile in question. Looks nice right?

I did not do my research like I normally do. I took my husbands beautiful red truck and went to the store to pick up the 300 square feet of tile I needed. The tile was not out so I had to get a store employee to locate it. It was way up high on top of the shelving hence they had to get out the fork lift to get the pallet down. Once they got it down I looked at it and it looked beautiful, just what I wanted. I pulled my truck around to the loading zone and waited for it to be loaded. Out came an older gentleman, who was very nice, and he loaded the truck up with 20 boxes of the very heavy, very large boxes of tile. Once I got home I immediately opened up a box and put one of the tiles down on the bathroom floor. Almost instantly I knew it was WRONG!

The Big Mistake

What have I done? How could I have been so dumb? I know better than to make such a rookie mistake. You always need to see whatever it is you are buying, whether its tile or paint or anything else in the space first before committing. I can not lie, there were a few tears. I tried really hard to like it and kept looking at it, trying to convince myself that it was ok. But it wasn’t. For the cost and size of this renovation I couldn’t just settle for this tile. I needed to love it. It was basically too grey and the veining in it was not sharp at all. Hopefully you can see what I mean in these pictures.  It is the bottom one in the first picture and the top one in the second picture. The one I am comparing it with is what I really wanted. Nice and white with beautiful veining. Unfortunately this sample was out of my price range….of course.

Thank god I didn’t get my boys to unload it all from the truck. I took the 20 boxes back to the store. I felt so bad that I had to make that poor man unload the 20 boxes of tile that he had just loaded up. Thankfully there was someone there that day to help him unload. I’m sure he was secretly calling my a crazy lady. Long story short ALWAYS bring home a sample and look at it in your space.

I then began my search again. This time I did what I was supposed to do and brought home sample after sample. You would think buying a white tile would be simple but no. Some are too blue, some are too grey, some are too yellow and on and on. The husband definitely thinks I’m a crazy person! Basically they are all white to him.

I also knew that I wanted a polished finish on the tile. This means it will be super shiny. You can also get tile with a matte finish. Lets get into some specifics about tile shall we.

PEI or Porcelain Enamel Institute

1. I learned that there is a PEI (Porcelain Enamel Institute) rating for tile. A PEI of 0 means that it is not suitable for walking and is the least scratch resistant. It is in other words wall tile. PEI of 1 is for light foot traffic. The rating goes  up to a 5 which is suitable for heavy foot traffic and is the most scratch resistant. Porcelain has a PEI rating from 3 to 5. Ceramic has a rating from 3 to 4.

2. I also learned that there is a DCOF rating which stands for Dynamic Coefficient of Friction. In other words how slippy it is! I thought that if my tile was shiny it would automatically be slippery. Not true. I tested my sample tiles and some of the shiny tiles were slippery and some were not. A DCOF of 0.43 is highly slip resistant and a rating of 0.30 is very slippery.

3. And lastly I learned that there is a water absorption rating. Non-vitreous rating means that it absorbs more than 7% of water. An impervious rating means it will absorb less than 0.5% of water.

OMG too much information.  Ok, enough of the science lesson.  How can this be so hard?! I basically walked on all of my sample tiles with wet feet, dry feet, and sock feet. Let me tell you, some of them I swear you could skate on they were so slippery! I ended up going for the one in the very middle of my samples call Statuary Blanco Polished. It is nice and shiny and not too slippery. And to my delight I discovered that it came in the size I wanted, 24 X 24!

To wrap up the best way to pick the right floor tile for your space is to take home LOTS of samples. Look at them in your space under your lighting.  You might also want to check out the PEI rating and the ‘slip’ factor of your tile. Here is a sneak peek of all of the tile for my new master bathroom.

I bet you are curious as to where I am going to put those cute sparkly hexagons! Stay tuned. Don’t forget to sign up to get Kay’s Place right to your inbox!

Thanks for stopping by the blog today.

Karla

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