Ceramic Tile Floors

Pulling it all together with ceramic tile.

More than any other floor covering, ceramic tile has the ability to pull together other room elements, using textures, patterns colors and accents limited only by your imagination. Straight layout or diagonal, much can be done to make it interesting and pleasing to the eye.

A narrow border.

At right, a sunroom in this Greenville, PA home benefits from a striking 2" wide border that we cut from a darker color of the same tile group.  To accent the corners, we cut small triangles and inserted them. This tile is from Imola (Magiara 35A, 13"), and is nearly a porcelain tile, though it does not quite meet specs to be classed as porcelain. With creamy white and beige tones, this tile has always been a favorite. Unfortunately it is no longer available in this color.

Tying together tiles of two different sizes and colors.

Two different tile sizes were problematic in this Roaming Shores, OH, home. The original carpeting proved not to be practical in the hallway, which received a lot of traffic to bedrooms, a bath, and the garage at the other end. The homeowner decided to replace it with tile. But how to match a new tile to the existing entry hall, without replacing the entry hall tile too? This was tricky, since the selected new tiles were of a different size than the existing tile.

The solution was to set the new tile on a diagonal with respect to the existing tile, aligning it with the hallway, and to clip the corners of the new tile, inserting 3" dots cut from entryway tile saved from original construction of the home.

The result was very pleasing, and it looked as though it had been designed this way from the beginning.

Large tile gives a feeling of space.

At right a 16" tile provided by the homeowner was used. With tile this large, it is important that the floor be exceptionally flat. In this case, we had an acceptable floor for this large tile, and it went down with little difficulty maintaining flatness. The tile itself was also a good quality tile, without any curvature to the surface. It made for a very beautiful floor, and was an excellent choice with the Granite countertop. We later tiled the back-splash with a matching color in a 6" tile, also provided by the homeowner.

As noted above, whenever a large tile is to be considered (anything over 13") it is important that the floor be "super flat", because a large tile simply will not tolerate a floor that is not nearly perfect in terms of flatness. If the installation is to be successful, not only from the standpoint of appearance, but also in terms of achieving sufficient bond and support underneath the tile, so that failure of the bond does not occur due to voids, flatness of the subfloor is a major concern. Please see "Installing Large Format Tile" for more on this subject.