My tile guy told me to use 1/4 inch grout lines on large format tiles - I pushed for 1/8 inch and now I'm redoing the whole kitchen floor

He said the 24x48 tiles would never lay flat enough for tight lines here in Albuquerque with our clay soil shifting. After 6 months I've got lippage all over and a few cracked tiles. Should I just let him handle the grout line size from now on?

2 comments

2 Comments

iris_jones8910d ago

Wait, hold on. 1/4 inch for 24x48 tiles? That sounds huge but holy smokes, 1/8 inch for a big tile like that in Albuquerque is just asking for trouble with the ground moving around like it does. I'm honestly shocked you talked him into it, those tight lines leave zero room for any tile to settle without looking like a mess. Six months is about when all that shifting would start showing up too, so this tracks perfectly. Let the guy who knows the local ground do his job on the grout lines, seriously.

robinson.jake10d agoTop Commenter

Whoa, hold up. I gotta disagree with you on this one. I've seen 1/4 inch lines work fine on big tiles like that in the Southwest, but 1/8 is the standard now for rectified porcelain if you prep the floor right. The issue here isn't really the grout line size, it's that the installer probably blew it on the mortar coverage or did a borderline job on the subfloor. A tight line with good thinset coverage and proper backbuttering will handle ground movement way better than a wide line that lets water pool and freeze. You're right that Albuquerque has shifting soil, but that's what proper expansion joints and a decoupling membrane are for, not your grout width. A wide joint just hides sloppy work, it doesn't fix the real problem.