Clearance floor tiles
Buying floor tiles: what actually matters
A wall tile and a floor tile are built differently
A wall tile only ever carries its own weight. A floor tile carries people, furniture and point loads from chair legs, so it is made denser, thicker and harder. You cannot tell them apart by looking, which is exactly the problem: a wall tile laid on a floor looks perfect for a year and then cracks under a fridge or a dropped pan. Every tile filtered onto this page is floor rated. The reverse is fine, a floor tile can always go on a wall, it is just heavier to fix and usually dearer than it needs to be.
Rectified edges give you a 2mm joint, and demand a flatter floor
A rectified tile has been mechanically cut after firing so every piece is the same size to a fraction of a millimetre, which is what allows very narrow grout lines. The trade-off is that a narrow joint has no tolerance to absorb an uneven substrate. Unrectified tiles vary slightly and need a wider joint, which quietly hides a lot. Product pages here state whether a line is rectified where the supplier told us.
How much to over-order, and why 10% is usually the wrong number
Ten per cent is the figure everyone repeats and it is only right for a simple rectangular room laid square with a large format tile. Straight lay in a plain room runs closer to 7 to 10%. A diagonal or herringbone lay wastes far more on the perimeter cuts, so 15 to 20% is realistic. Small formats and mosaics waste more again as a proportion. Rooms with lots of edges, a hob, a niche, a stepped floor, push it up. Because this stock does not come back, round up to the next whole box and then add one more: a spare box costs less than the tile and stops a single cracked tile in year three becoming a whole new floor.
No two batches are exactly the same shade
Tiles are fired in batches and no two batches are exactly the same shade. The difference is usually invisible in the box and obvious across a finished floor in daylight. Where a supplier has told us how many batches make up a line, the product page says so, and it says how big the largest single batch is: that is the largest area you can lay with no shade variation at all. Where they have not told us, the page says nothing rather than guessing. If you are laying one continuous floor, buy within one batch or accept that you are mixing, and if you are mixing, open several boxes at once and lay from all of them rather than box by box, so any variation reads as texture instead of a seam.
Why this stock is such good value
Clearance tiles are not seconds. Everything here is first grade. It is cheap because it is finite: a line an importer is clearing, a colourway a manufacturer has stopped making, or the tail of a container that nobody wants to keep warehousing. The catch is not quality, it is that you cannot get more. On a normal tile you can go back in six weeks for another two boxes. Here you cannot, so the quantity you order is the quantity you will ever have.