Floor Tile Installation in Greenville, SC

Is my subfloor ready for tile?

A subfloor is ready for tile when it is stiff enough not to flex underfoot, flat enough for the size of tile you picked, and clean and dry. The bigger the tile, the flatter the floor has to be.

• Stiffness: a floor that bounces gets reinforced before any tile goes down
• Flatness: checked with a straightedge; high and low spots are fixed, not tiled over
• Clean and dry: no old adhesive and no unresolved moisture
• Movement joints: needed at the walls and across large areas, where many cracked floors started
• Uncoupling membrane where the floor calls for it, especially over concrete slabs

What type of tile is best for flooring?

Porcelain is the best all-round floor tile: it is dense, absorbs very little water and holds up to traffic, pets and wet areas. Ceramic is fine for low-traffic rooms and walls. Natural stone is beautiful and needs sealing and more care.

For a kitchen, an entry or a laundry room that takes real use, we usually point people to porcelain. The look you want, wood-plank, stone or concrete, almost always comes in a porcelain version.

Large-format and porcelain floors

Large-format tile, 24 inches and up, needs a flatter subfloor, a bigger trowel, mortar spread on the back of each tile for full coverage, and a leveling system to keep the edges even.

Large format shows every shortcut. A floor that looks fine under 12-inch tile will show every wave under a 24 by 48, so this is where the prep time goes.

What drives the cost of a tile floor?

The price of a tile floor comes from the square footage, the condition of the subfloor, the tile size and pattern, and what has to come out first. Two floors of the same size can be priced very differently if one of them needs the subfloor corrected.

• Removal of the old floor, and whether it was tile, vinyl or carpet
• Subfloor work: reinforcing, leveling or an uncoupling membrane
• Tile format: large-format and stone take longer to set flat
• Pattern: diagonal, herringbone and borders mean more cuts
• Transitions, thresholds and baseboard work at the doorways

Why do tile floors crack?

Tile floors crack because of flex in the subfloor, missing movement joints or gaps in the mortar underneath. The tile is what breaks, but it is rarely what failed. Swapping the cracked tile without fixing the cause brings the crack back.