8 Tips for Nailing the Wood Tile Look

One of our local clients is replacing all of her downstairs floors this fall and requested a porcelain wood tile. As I've been looking around for her, I've been floored (ha! pun.) by the amazing options available right now! Wood tile has come SO far the past few years.

I do love the softer feel and warmth of real wood underfoot, but sometimes it really makes sense to use a wood tile instead. Because tile is completely waterproof and scratch resistant (I wish I could say the same for my wood floors we put in only two years ago...), it is a super smart option for homes built on concrete slabs and for pet owners. Also, since the tile can be installed in kitchens and bathrooms without worry, it's a great option for more open concept homes. It's nice to be able to install the wood tile everywhere without transitions.

image

I picked up these samples from my local Floor & Decor - they had two full rows of just wood tile options. Each of these are under $4.25/sq foot! Insane pricing!!

1  //  2  //  3  //  4  //  5  //  6  //  7  //   8  //  9  //  10

If you're thinking of wood tile for your home, here are my best tips:

1) Choose a tile with a more subtle wood texture and a pattern made by an inkjet with a lot of pattern variation. Some of these tiles have as many as ten different pattern variations in each colorway.

1  //  2  //  3

2) Since there are pattern repeats, be sure to rotate the orientation of the tiles often to help break up the overall look. You don't want to be able to spot the same pattern in one glance!

image

3) Choose a tile with a rectified edge rather than a pressed edge. You can get much tighter grout lines with tile that has more exact edges.

image

4) Wood-look tiles come in a few different forms - ceramic, porcelain and concrete. Porcelain is considered the best choice. It's super hard-wearing and affordable.

5) When you're choosing a grout color, find the darkest color in your tile and chose one shade deeper for your grout color. This tricks the eye into thinking that the grout lines are shadow around the "wood planks" especially if you have a rectified edge tile and really small grout lines.  Floor & Decor sells a great line of pre-mixed super stain-resistant grout that comes in a million different colors. It's so easy to find a shade that works best!

6) Generally I like wood tile planks to be at least 40" long, but 48" or longer is ideal. The shorter planks can be a give away and make it harder to trick the eye into thinking the tile is actually wood.

7) If you've found a wood tile that you really love, but it only comes in 24 or 30" planks, like many of them do, try a herringbone pattern with the shorter planks. The proportions will be just right!

image

image

8) Sometimes people think it's a good idea to lay wood tile in a stacked, geometric tile pattern (like a running bond pattern), but that's another give away that your flooring is not actually wood. Laying the tile in a very random order, just like real wood, helps trick the eye.

image

Those are my best tips for choosing a great wood tile! Do you have any to add? One of my friends is putting this tile in her house in a herringbone pattern and it is looking amazing! I'm thinking something similar would be great for my client's home.

A big thanks to Floor & Decor for sponsoring this flooring series! Check out my last post on decorative tiles here.

I Have This Thing With Floors (the Hex Tile Chapter)

My parents' big remodel is in the home stretch! There are three bathrooms that need tile and that's just about it. But three bathrooms worth of tile is a ton of tile! And we're at that point in the project where my parents are sort of sick of spending money so every dollar spent needs to really count. We used some of the quartzite from their kitchen for the countertops in the bathrooms, so that helped us with the budget, but that limited our tile options too. As we learned picking a backsplash tile, quartzite is gorgeous but is hard to pair up with tile!

Cement tiles are so cool and I would love to get to use them here, but they're not in the budget. I also really loved this teak wood tile, but again, it's on the pricey side. What IS in the budget though is $3.99/sq ft hex tiles. We found a ton at local discount tile stores all around the Valley. Floor and Decor has some really pretty grays and neutrals which would look great with the quartzite. We're just going to pop out and replace tiles of different colors in a repeating pattern on the mesh sheets. The gorgeous and talented Gwen from The Makerista did this in her bathroom and it turned out SO WELL. I think she actually had to place each tile by hand, which sounds really labor intensive, but look at the results! What a beautiful floor!

My parents live in a city called Snowflake, and we've talked about doing something like these snowflake patterns here, but we're still thinking about it. Is that too literal? Part of me sort of loves the idea.

image

I've found a million different patterns on the #Ihavethisthingwithfloors instagram account and hashtag. I feel like this account was made just for me. I majorly have a thing for good floors (and I bet you do, too). Check these out:

image

The girls upstairs bathroom is next on my list to tackle, so if all goes well with this tile project in my parents' house, I'd love to do something sweet and girly like one of these:

image

image

image

So many possibilities!! This last one makes my heart get all fluttery.  :)

(all images from here unless otherwise noted).

Using (and Not Using) Wood Flooring in Kitchens

I'm still here -- and still pregnant! :) The good news is after weeks of hanging out breech, baby girl has flipped finally, just under the wire! Thanks for all your tips and tricks in the comments of my last post. It's a bit of a waiting game now, but we're so excited for her to come whenever she's ready.

image

I took on a couple of design jobs before the holidays to help keep me busy the last month of my pregnancy and while I'm home with a newborn. Both involve full gut-reno redesigns of the kitchens, which I've not done a ton of in the past. It's been really a really fun challenge and so far, so good! The cabinets are designed and the counter tops and appliances ordered, but I'm a little stuck on flooring.

image

In both projects the home owners are feeling a little nervous about installing the same wood floors that we're putting in the rest of their homes, in their kitchens.

I love the look of a warm wood floor against painted cabinets, so it's hard to not push on this one, but I have to admit I feel some of the same apprehension as we're getting closer to a big kitchen remodel of our own.

image

Both clients have considered wood-look tile, but we are having trouble finding a style that we like enough to use throughout the homes. We sort of feel like our two real options are wood everywhere or stone in the kitchen and utility spaces and wood in the rest of the house. Which means transitions...which can be tricky with more open floor plans...which both homes are.

(image from Domino. The slate flooring is in a bathroom and not a kitchen obviously, but the colors of the floors are almost spot-on for what we're looking at in one of the houses and it's helpful to see the transition.)

image

Our favorite stone options are limestone and slate, though we're still open to pattern. Here are some of the images we've been looking at to help us get a sense of what stone or tile can look like in a kitchen space:

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image

image - another bathroom, but I like this color, size and pattern!

image

image

image

image

It seems like it comes down to personal preference and comfort level in the end, but I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Have you had any nightmare disasters with wood floors in your kitchen? Or is there a stone that you've used and loved? Or maybe you have tips for making a more smooth transition between the two materials?