GLAZED PORCELAIN PLANK TILES THAT LOOK LIKE REAL WOOD FLOORS

Our teenage son is ready for a room overhaul and he says carpet is out!  He wants tile so we all agreed/compromised on these porcelain tiles that look like wood planks.

We were not compensated in any way by MARAZZI or the HOME DEPOT for this post.  However, if either one of these companies would like to provide more of this tile we would be more than happy to complete two more rooms! 

Eddie & I are DIY'ers all the way.  Our motto has always been to try it first and only pay someone if we screw things up.  Knock on wood, but so far we've learned we can do a whole lot of stuff ourselves.  

Here's a few pictures of the installation process.

To begin with we set our chalk line and worked off of that just to make sure everything was square.

We made sure our seams were very small to mimic a real wood floor.  Our biggest trouble was a couple spots were our concrete dipped.  We just added extra thin set under those spots.

Moving right along!  I would work ahead and lay thin set and make the cuts on the wet saw so that Eddie could just keep laying tile. Our teamwork made this project move along at a pretty good pace & helped save Eddie's back since he didn't have to get up and down a lot.

We let the floor dry for about 48 hours only because this whole project fell in between shifts at the fire house.  Normally, 24 would have been fine.  

Let the grouting party begin...

I love how the tiles have a textured surface.  I'm not going to lie...I hated the whole grouting process.  The directions said to let it dry about 20 minutes before you started cleaning off the tiles which we did.  The directions also said to wipe them down twice...  I think I did this FOUR times because I wanted to make sure it was all off so we didn't wind up with a hazy floor.

The grout color we used was Polyblend #52 Tobacco Brown.

Here's how it looks now that his room is put back together.

I really wasn't sure how I'd feel with tile in a bedroom but we all couldn't be happier with how things turned out.  

We still need to purchase a large rug to go under his bed so he has something soft to step on after getting out of bed.  I'll update ya when we find the perfect one.