Tile in Wright City,
one bathroom at a time

Porcelain against ceramic, ratings, formats and how tile behaves underfoot are set out on the tile pillar and stay there. This page is about tile in the rooms it actually goes into in Wright City: builder bathrooms in detached houses from the two decades that produced 34.3 percent and 25.0 percent of this city's housing.

A builder bathroom is a small floor with a great many edges

The floor in a hall bath from these plans is not large, and almost none of it is open. There is a tub or a shower base along one wall, a vanity along another, a toilet flange in the middle of what is left, a door threshold and usually a heat register. Tile in a room like that is a layout problem rather than an area problem: where the full tiles land, where the cuts go, whether the pattern is centered on the room or on the vanity, and which cut ends up in the sightline from the doorway.

That is why we lay the room out on paper at the measure rather than taking a length and a width away with us. Two tile sizes in the same small floor can produce completely different amounts of visible cutting, and you should get to choose which one you are looking at.

Two or three baths in one house, done in an order that keeps one working

A detached house built to these plans usually has more than one bathroom, and in a household that owns the house and is staying, they get upgraded across several years rather than all at once. So sequence is part of the conversation: which room comes first, how long the household is short of it, and whether the second one should wait until you have lived with the first.

It also means matching later. If the hall bath is done this year and the main bath in two years, the note we leave with you records exactly what went in, so the second room can be a deliberate decision to match or to differ rather than an accident. The height the new floor finishes at is recorded in the same note, since how a tile floor is built up is set out on the tile pillar and the number it lands on is particular to your room.

What sits under a bath floor put down around 2007

With a median build year of 2007 across the city's housing, the covering coming out of a Wright City bathroom is usually the original one, over a substrate the builder specified and nobody has touched since. That is a much shorter list of unknowns than an older town's bathroom, where the floor may have been redone twice around the same fixtures.

Short list is not no list. The measure still gets under the covering at the threshold and looks, because a bathroom is the one room where what is underneath has usually had water somewhere near it, and because the answer changes what can be done on top.

Grout, and a room lit by a single fixture

A builder bathroom is usually lit by one fixture over the vanity and whatever daylight a small window gives it. Tile and grout chosen under showroom lighting can read very differently in that room, and grout is the half of the decision people forget until it is set. So samples go out with the tile and the grout together, to be looked at in the actual room with the actual light on, which is a short errand when the house is 7.8 road miles away.

Twelve minutes, on a job measured in days rather than hours

Wright City is 7.8 road miles WNW of the showroom, about 12 minutes on I-70. Tile is the material where that shows up in scheduling rather than in sample runs, because a tile floor is a setting job with stages and a household waiting on a room. A short haul means the return visits in the middle of the work are ordinary rather than an expedition. MoDOT's Improve I-70 work covers this stretch, so arrival windows are given with the corridor in mind.

What the measure records in a Wright City bathroom

• The room drawn properly, with the tub or shower base, vanity, flange, register and threshold all in place
• Where the full tiles land and where the cuts fall, decided before anything is ordered
• The finished height at the door, and what the door will clear once the floor is up
• What is under the existing covering, checked at the threshold rather than assumed
• Which surface the room opens onto, since it is usually carpet in this stock
• Grout choice looked at in the room, under the fixture that actually lights it

The lines we keep, and where tile is not the right answer

For tile we keep lines including Virginia Tile, DalTile, MSI and Emser. Tile is not automatically the answer for every hard floor in this house. If the question is the hall and the stair flight, laminate in Wright City is the more sensible comparison, and tile against laminate sets the two side by side. If the whole open main floor is going hard, look at luxury vinyl plank in Wright City instead. Bathrooms are where tile earns its place in this stock, and the town behind all of it is on the Wright City page.