With poor quality tile, and the cull rate that goes along with it, the eventual square footage cost is much much higher than advertised. If 1/3 of every box is too wavy, or the wrong size, or the wrong color, your price just went up to $4 a square. The install price is a lot higher for junk too. If they will even install it. No real pro will deal with that stuff. They will send you to their trusted sources.

Not looking for tile installers. Looking for high quality porcelain tile at $3 a sq ft and any tips on getting the price as low as possible.

Shop where the installers do. To the trade sources will always have the best options at the lowest prices. That’s why the Pros shop there. Box store tile is mostly seconds garbage.

Better buy and understand a TCNA manual first before you say you aren’t looking for an installer. Or you’ll be buying the tile twice, plus the labor.

Our local tile shop, which is where our installer sent us, has a back room with a lot of tile on sale. Much of it very inexpensive-and he has some that he has less than 100 square feet of that he just posted on Craigslist for a buck a foot. We’re planning to grab some for a small mudroom floor.

Floor and Decor has a large selection

We bought all of the tile for our 3 upstairs bathroom remodels from Home Depot in February. The only problem is that their in-store inventory is very limited; most of their tile is only sold online, and you have to have it delivered to the store for pick up. It's hard to tell online what the tile really looks like. So, it took several weeks to find what I wanted. I would order 1 box of a several different tiles, have them delivered to my local store, open at the service desk, take a look, and then immediately return if it wasn't right. Rinse and repeat until I found what I wanted. I did this over the course of several weeks while waiting for the project to start, and while gathering all the other materials such as fixtures, etc. My tile pro had the final approval on the material. If he thought there would be an installation issue with any product he told me and we would discuss. Regarding HD tile quality, he told me that the brand-name tiles at HD such as Emser and Daltile are the same as in the local retail stores. There was no higher than normal cull rate, and all the bathrooms came out great, thanks to an excellent tile pro.

For my master bathroom 2 years ago, we bought locally because I wanted certain specific tiles that weren't on the HD site. For those, I found that if you are buying larger tiles (such as 12 x 24) the price is a lot lower than smaller tiles, special shapes or mosaics. But even for the local shops, my tile pro bought it for me and I just wrote him a check for his price which was a very subtantial discount from retail.

About installation, I'm wondering if you are planning on DIY or are you hiring a tile pro?