A Tile Tale

This is my kitchen floor and I absolutely love it! We installed it ourselves a few months ago using a crate of miscellaneous tiles purchased from a tile store for $25. (They were selling them individually for $.20 a piece for crafts--you know, those cutesy sayings people put on them with vinyl letters?) Most of these tiles were large, high quality, porcelain tiles, typically in the range of $5-$8 a square foot. We didn't have quite enough for all 200 plus square feet so we purchased 2 boxes of new tile from Home Depot for $50 to round it all out. So $75 dollars for 214 sq. ft. of tiles comes out to about $.35 a square foot. Not bad if I do say so myself.

Be warned, this is VERY labor intensive. I spent the large part of 2 whole days working out the design scheme. As the pattern is random, it all has to be laid out dry to make sure it will fit and look the way you want it too. As we had many different tile sizes, we had to cut a lot of pieces to fill in the various sized gaps created. Caveat: try and make sure all of your tiles are the same thickness or you'll end up with some uneven places in the finished floor (we learned this the hard way).

If you have the time, you could do this even cheaper. I called around to a few tile installers asking for scraps. Most of them said that when finished with a job, they would have several buckets of tile cuts and remnants destined for the landfill. They were more than willing to have me come and haul their garbage away after them. I would imagine that it wouldn't take too long to collect enough for even a very large area. Of course, now you're dealing with even smaller fragments and would really have to create almost a mosaic. Could be very cool. I may try this in the basement bathroom and will, of course, let you know how it turns out.