Buying Tiles
Are you thinking about upgrading or remodelling a new home? If your plans include the bathroom or kitchen, you can buy and install new tiles to give your home colour, style, and a brand new look. With tiles, you can choose from something traditional such as off-white, go with a contemporary style to include mosaic, or go ethnic with Mexican tiles. The possibilities are great and the selection HUGE. By shopping for sales, you can find many wonderful choices to enhance your home.
Whether buying wall tile, countertop tile, or floor tile, the most important thing is to choose the right tile. Although you want tile that looks great, you want to consider far more than looks. The goal is to choose tile that will hold up for its intended purpose. For instance, if you are planning adding tile to your countertops, then you want something strong to handle acid and food stains. In this case, while natural stone is gorgeous, it is also porous, meaning it absorbs foods and oils. Therefore, consider the best choice and then select.
Another consideration for buying tiles has to do with flooring. Obviously, floor tile will experience traffic, mud, dirt, shoe marks, etc. Therefore, you want tiles that will wear extremely well. For flooring, you also want strong tiles. For instance, did you know that a 125-pound woman wearing high heel exerts 500 pounds per square inch of pressure on a floor, which is actually more than a large refrigerator? For this reason, you want tile that looks great but more importantly, handles the traffic.
Then, if you plan to change your bathroom, you would typically use smaller floor tiles than you would use in the dining room, kitchen, or foyer. The only downfall to tile in the bathroom is that if the tiles are too small, they can make the room appear much smaller than it is. For this reason, instead of using 8x8-inch tiles, you might go up to 10x10 or 12x12-inch tiles. Then, you want to consider that bathrooms are rooms with water and humidity so again choose accordingly.
Now, while many people will use the larger size tiles such as 16x16 or 20x20-inch for floors, you can also use the larger tiles for countertops, ceilings, and shower walls. The look is far more dramatic and sophisticated because you have more colours and/or texture and not as many grout lines. This means a sleek look that is not as busy as a traditional shower or bath wall. When the larger tiles are used on kitchen countertops, the result is an appearance of bigger space.
The tiles on the market today are made from all types of materials but the top choices are granite, marble, limestone, and other types of natural stone. When choosing your new tiles, consider cleanability and of course, the way it will enhance the room. By shopping home improvement stores, you can often find discontinued tiles that would work great and save you money. Just make sure there are enough tile pieces for your project plus a few extra in case one should break.