RENO: Tile Painting - Affordable + Totally Possible

When I told people I was going to paint our tile floors, they told us we were crazy. "It chips!" "It won't last!" "Just go with vinyl flooring!" we heard. Yet I couldn't bring myself to stamp vinyl flooring over such quality stone tile. The truth was, we had beautiful, quality, and heated flooring - the color scheme was just very outdated. We needed a modernized, clean look.

This is a project I've yearned to do the last 2 years since we bought our forever home. Originally, I tried to work with the multi-colored flooring - painting and repainting the walls to try to match the mix-tiled colors but at the end of the day I found myself dizzy and OCD-triggered. If you know, you know. Here is a BEFORE picture so you know how difficult it was to color-coordinate with this floor:

See, told ya. So as the story goes, the hubs and I took the plunge and decided to paint. We opted for Home Depot's Rust-oleum floor coating after many blogs read and lots of research on the process of painting tile flooring. We chose the color Charcoal Gray and decided to make modifications to the color scheme of our home thereafter. Lessons learned: work the rest of the house around your floor color!

I won't lie when I tell you it is a tedious labor of love but once you get into the rhythem, it flows. Each section of tile had to first be cleaned. We bought seperate tile cleaning products and also used Goo Gone on any tough spots. I also found that I had to clean and touch up my baseboards so I knocked that our while I was down there.

We chose to paint section by section and would block off "sections" of our house in order to still have some function during this process. We have two toddlers and a dog who did suprisingly well during this reno. Once cleaning was done, we would apply a first coat, a second coat, and then a top gloss which is made to protect against chips in the paint.

I think it's important to note that we totally expect that paint chips will happen over time. We have a house full of children and a very busy home life. We thought this option was more cost-effective for us now and couldn't part with the beautiful tile. We just intend to always keep around touch-up supplies in the event it does happen. Just as we do for our wooden cabinets which were painted. We absolutely loved our final result. We thought the contrast of dark flooring with light cabinents really accented the room. Our floor plan is a decent open layout with the kitchen area as focus. The tile actually runs in all but the front living room. It tooks us 2.5 weeks to complete the process.