Affordable Tile Selections for Your Home

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I promised you all a post about our tile selections, and today I’m here to deliver. I’ll also share with you our tile allowances per square foot to give you an idea and to showcase that we are totally doing this on a budget even if it is a new house construction.

So whether you’re building and trying to fit champagne taste into a builder’s beer budget OR thinking of doing a renovation in your current/future home, this post will hopefully resonate with you.

As a recap, our new home will feature tile all throughout. We will have ZERO carpet in this house, and I am thrilled. We will definitely have rugs, but I really hate carpet. 

To keep the flow and look of our new home cohesive, we used one tile all throughout the floors I begged and begged for D to let me use the black and white cement-look tiles for the half bath or laundry room, and he was adamant about me not doing that, and ultimately, I think he was right on this one.

Initially we wanted wood-look tile, but we couldn’t find any that fit in our $2 per square foot, tax inclusive, budget that didn’t look like a weathered/rustic farmhouse look and that is simply not our jam. Even if we bumped it up to $2.50/sf. we would have spent an extra $900+. We ended up choosing a marble look, bright white with grey veining, 6″x24″ tile by MS International available at Home Depot. 

Installed, it looks fab and bright. It’s timeless. It still needs to be grouted, but here’s a sneak peek. 

And it looks lovely against our kitchen cabinets, too. The whole house is bright and white, which is such a lovely backdrop for all the decor I have planned. Here’s the floor after it’s been grouted. We used platinum colored grout.

While we’re in the kitchen, let’s discuss our backsplash choices. Our allowance was $11 sf. tax inclusive. The gorgeous Reflection Diamond White Thassos & Mirror tile I wanted from Tile Bar was $19.99/sf. BUT by the time it came time to order for our project there were only SEVEN tiles left. 

The tile is stunning and a true white color with no veining. Given the shortage of these tiles (as I hit publish on this post in August 2017 it’s still not back in stock), I had to settle for it as an accent above the cooktop framed with a coordinating Thassos pencil border. 

For the rest of the backsplash, we opted for a marble look subway mosaic tile from Lowes that was about $6.98/sf.

The final tile selections we had to make were for our master walk-in shower. Our allowance for the shower walls was $2.50/sf. and for the shower floor it was $11 sf. and we pretty much stuck to that when choosing our tiles.

We ended up selecting 12×24 marble look tiles for the shower walls and bench tiled in a brick pattern along with a hex marble mosaic for the shower floor.

Our tiles definitely all play it safe with a neutral white/gray tone, but we chose these tiles specifically for their ease of maintenance and timeless qualities. We assumed we’d never do a heavy duty renovation to change them, so that and budget were our main considerations. 

Another important choice was our granite, and we went with fantasy brown granite since it was affordable and had the marble look without the hefty price tag.

We specifically chose the slabs we wanted to ensure it was more on the gray/white side than the brown side, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.

I hope our choices/thought process help someone out there…I was overwhelmed with trying to find stylish tile in our allowance/budget. There’s a lot of tile out there that can get really pricey, so our choices prove you can have both form and function. As the backsplash and shower tile get installed, I’ll update this post. 

And as always, if you have questions please drop me a comment or shoot me an email. In the next post I’ll focus on the lighting choices for the house– there’s a lot, so it may be a 2-part post. Have a fabulous day, xo!

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