white tile 1.79 sf

disclaimer: I do NOT work for floor & decor

This post was edited by mdln on Sun, Mar 9, 14 at 13:58

Thank you for the screen shots! I hadn't come across this shop in my searches :-)

They are all seconds or imports, so don't plan on any tight grout lines. Go to a real tile store, and talk to some pros. They can find you some candidates, but your price point is really low for what you're looking for.

hollysprings -- thanks for that clarification! Do you have any idea as to why I can find tile in the size/price I'm looking for, but in alternative colors? Does glossy white have a low demand?

I can probably go back out to a shop tomorrow and keep looking; DH was not happy we couldn't find something I liked at HD. He thought we were going to buy that Marissa Cararra marble-look tile.

White ceramics or porcelains are not the easiest thing to find because white is difficult to get "white". It's worse than the 10,000 posts a year in the Décor Forum asking about the "perfect" white. Most tiles actually aren't all that white when you objectively judge them against a white balance scale, especially the red clay based ones. White glazes vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. And the whitest white tiles are the most expensive because of that difficulty. The whitest white tiles are usually a white bodied porcelain, with an expensive white glaze for the top surface.

"Plain" is also more difficult to achieve than a tile with a little bit of a swirl or movement to the color, or texture to the finish. A plain glossy tile has to be absolutely perfectly smooth, or you notice it. Simple IS usually the hardest thing to create in any design, because of the much tighter tolerances and no trims to fall back on.

You're asking for a double whammy, truly white and plain,

Pure white anything tends to be more expensive. I believe even the ultrawhite Corian and other solid surfaces, and pure white quartzes are all in higher price categories.

Speckles, swirls, textures, non flat edges and all sorts of "decorative" elements are ways to cover imperfections and deal with potential edge chipping. Plain, flat and white requires a pretty high standard of quality control.

Luckily I'm not trying to perfectly match the white tub to the white tile to the white sink basin, the white toilet, and the white Swanstone niche LOL! I like things to not look busy, and since we are tiling the shower and lower half of ALL the walls, I couldn't stand a busy tile any more. And DH didn't want to use anything "too small". :-/

I'm really surprised, though, although your explanations make a lot of sense. I also just found out the floor tile I loved will take a month to arrive...so I'll be looking for an alternative to that as well.

I think I found something else on the Home Depot website that I can order for the walls, along with a coordinating bullnose (yay). So hopefully they have an okay floor tile too. I guess our plans to tile using what they had in stock at HD was not a very watertight plan ;-)

More searching has potentially paid off :-) Planning to order these white wall tiles w/matching bullnose:

white tile

white bullnose

And these dark grey flooring tiles w/matching bullnose:

dark floor

dark floor bullnose

Just wanted to update that I ordered the tiles I linked from HD. They are here and are exactly as I had hoped.

I can't tell, though, if the floor tiles -- which I thought were supposed to be the same color in the body as on the surface -- actually are! :-/ I think the style was described as being "colorbody" but the edges seem lighter than the surface.