Porcelain Wood Look Tile Floor

This project, literally was not planned, at all!  One morning we are sitting on the couch and my honey says, (pointing into the the entry hall) "let's rip out that floor".  Um, ok, then what? lol!  I wasn't going to argue with him though because we haven't done a DIY project in forever and I have hated this floor since we moved in 6 years ago!

The before and after is so huge!  I still just stop and stare into the hallway and think how much better it looks now.  I love it so  much!  Note: this picture makes the new tile look way lighter than it is, Instagram filters in action!

This old tile is a terracotta type tile and as you can see it was NOT properly installed to begin with.  I believe they must have had a limited amount of tile and just made the grout lines huge to make it all work out.  When you walked on it, it sounded hollow.  Yall, I just did not like it!

Let's just say I was not sad to see my honey rip this floor out.  I was his biggest cheerleader that day!

The first few tiles were very easy to remove because they practically had no mastic underneath them.  I guess they were short on a lot of things when they did this project.  Weird!

The floor near the living room had lots of whatever this is they used to place the tiles down, then it got thinner and thinner as it came closer to the front door.

Next, we ran to Lowe's and picked out some tile.  I knew I wanted the wood look tiles for sure.  I've been drooling over that type tile since it became popular.  We bought the tiles for the kitchen/dining room at Lowe's too, so we grabbed a few tiles of that style to compare.  You see, some day (soon I hope) we plan on tiling the living room in the same wood look tile, which meets right up to the kitchen/dining room floor, so it kinda needs to look good.  The light color tile on the right looked too much like our other tile (top right) so we went with the darker one on the left so there would be a bit of contrast and hopefully look better than blending in with the existing floors.

Our entry hall measures 10' x 4'.  These are the tiles that we ended up with.  Kaden Walnut #0591545.  For this job we used 3 full boxes and 3/4 of another one.

I didn't really document the step my honey took after we returned from Lowe's because it was extremely messy and dusty and I was just trying to make sure the dust cloud didn't get too much into my house.

What he did was try and smooth down that "whatever it was" that they used to stick the old tiles down.  It was hard as my head and not budging at all!  He tried using a chisel and hammer to chip it away, that didn't work, so he tried sanding it down with the grinder, that didn't really work either but he worked for about an hour until he got it as smooth as possible so the new tiles would sit pretty level.

The first few tiles he laid down looked extremely dark and I immediately got nervous that we had chosen the wrong color tiles.  Our home is small and I didn't want it to look smaller by any means!

But as he laid down more tiles, it started to look lighter and I loved it!  Even with the spacers still sitting in it, I liked it 100% more than the old tiles that used to be there!

Now for grout,  what a messy step!  We chose a dark grout this time since the majority of the tiles were dark.  We used an un-sanded grout in the shade Mocha U42, also from Lowe's.

We waited the recommended 20 minutes, then started to do the clean up, that was my job and WOW!  For such a small space, it was so hard to get this darker grout up.  I don't remember it being such a chore  in the kitchen area and that was a big space!  We had two buckets of water going for quite a while.  I used the fan to make the drying process go faster.

This is not a good picture because it was late in the day, but believe me when I tell you its so nice and pretty and not hollow sounding when you walk on it! lol!

You may have already noticed that the picture above this one shows the closet door painted, that's another post because I not only painted the door, but all the trim and I totally made the old door hardware match the new front door hardware with a little ORB spray paint. Saving those $$$$ yall!

If you'd like to see how we did our other tiled floors, look here:

Tiling Our Kitchen Floor
Tiles and Tribulation of our Laundry Room 
DIY Perfect Baseboards

 It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!
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