I'm sorry, but I'd have your GC eat the cost of the craptastic job his subbed out to this tile guy. You gave him a chance to fix it; it didn't get fixed. End of story. He pays for the redo, and if it makes you sleep better at night you find the contractor to do the replacement tile. But in no way would I be reaching my hand into my pocket!

We have that same tile on our shower floor in one of the bathrooms that hubby and I remodeled. Ours was a diy job and we are very experienced DIYers. When it came to laying that floor we struggled and struggled when we were doing our mock layout, we could NOT get it to where we couldn’t see seams. I threw my hands up in the air and proceeded to pull off every darn rock off each sheet and we hand set every darn rock. It turned out fantastic (except for a couple of spots where we wiped away too much of the grout during that part of the job, so water likes to pool in those low spots now... sigh... it was the first time we’d ever done that kind of floor though, live and learn, and maybe one day we will chip out the grout there and redo it, for now I just use a little extra bleach when I clean there.) But yeah, I’ve seen more jobs done incorrectly with those sheets of random rocks than done correctly. I hear there’s a way to just pull of some of the rocks but not all of them so that you kind of fill in those lines, but I discovered that after the fact.

How are these installed? What I'm not see are expansion gaps at the wall. You showed a box that has 3/4" written as the thickness. That means the expansion gap at ALL vertical obstacles (walls, door jams, stair risers, etc) should be 3/4". I'm sorry but you have more issues than the transition strips. Your transition strips are the least of your worries. How long were the floors allowed to acclimate in the house BEFORE they were installed? PLEASE tell me these floors were allowed a week at least? May be 2 wks. If you think they were NOT in the home for that length of time, ask the GC where the document for the MOISTURE READINGS is. It should make him look like a doofus when he asks YOU what that is. If you want the GC (who is YOUR employee) to stop saying, "It's supposed to be like this" then you better get your floor inspected. www.nwfa.org They have inspectors listed in both the USA and Canada. I did a quick search for a small area in T.O. and it showed 8 inspectors. If I give it a wider radius I'll get as many as 15 inspectors inside of 50 miles (80 km). While you are there, go ahead and see who is a certified INSTALLER. Your GC has 1 attempt to correct all of these issues. Once he gives it the good ol' college try, you get to find your OWN professional and have the GC pay for it....see where I'm going with this? Confront the GC and find out WHO installed the floor (the name of the person on the crew). If it was himself, then he is going to find out how costly it is to have a bad install with a wood floor. Again, if you are not happy with the work, you are welcome to get the flooring inspected. Most GC's understand how BAD it looks when a homeowner pays for an inspection. Because most GC's are smart enough to realize a bad report means MONEY of of their pocket AND they have to spend more TIME fixing the issues.

Thanks for the insight, Joseph! Sorry, I may have used the wrong words. We hired a tile company who took care of everything and scoped all the work. They hired their own guy and said it would be great. But I think your sentiment still stands that the issue is the ceiling and not the tile work - that’s what I was curious about so thank you!