I Painted our ugly, builder-grade, tan, bleh tile floor in the bathroom. Major gamble on if it would hold up, because its the kids’ bathroom & they are not easy on this floor!
It has been 6 months and the painted bathroom floor tile is holding up great through all the wear and life that goes on in there…
The Job:
The prep I did was clean with TSP… I realized later that I diluted it WAY more than you are supposed to! I think I put like a 1/4 tsp in a gal of water and you are supposed to put a 1/4 CUP, but I cleaned and rinsed it twice very thoroughly with this mostly water mixture, ha. … sidenote- I was all nervous using TSP bc it is straight chemicals and has warnings all over the place, but I wanted this project to hold up- so chemicals it is.
To paint I got Kiltz Concrete and Garage Floor Paint in Slate Gray. I was going for the natural slate tile look. Since it wouldn’t look like my vision with one flat gray color over the whole thing- I mixed different craft paints and wall paints with it in small amounts to get the varied colors.
–If I did it again, I would cover the entire floor with a coat of this floor paint first, then go in on the second coat to add the variated floor colors. I think it would hold up in this high traffic area better if this non-diluted thick epoxy paint could grab onto the actual tile on every square inch of the bathroom.
I went right over the grout and then at the end painted grout lines on with regular paint.
After it looked good and done, I put 4-6 coats Varathane Matte Floor Finish for High Traffic Areas. on it. The recoat time was about 4 hours, so it took days with breaks to live life and keep the kids alive and all.
After that was all on I gave it 2 weeks to cure before we started using that bathroom again.
Painted Bathroom Floor Tile
We transformed the tile floor in our other bathroom with paint as well… In this bathroom we used a Matte white paint with a black herringbone pattern. Check out that floor here!
How has it held up:
It has held up really well. At the beginning I was a sergeant about cleaning up any water right away, etc. But after awhile I decided we are just going to live on it how we normally would and in a year I can do touch-ups where needed and pile the floor poly on those areas after for extra durability. I don’t think the touch-ups will be hard to blend because the tile has texture to it, so they’ll just look like another variation in the tile.
How did you get the different colors to mix on the tile? Is it a certain brush or application to get different colors to mix?
I just used a paint brush and a sponge and kind of dabbed the other color around the edges of the different color splotches I had on the tile. You can use a sponge and experiment with what works best! If you put different paints on a paper plate it is really easy to grab paint with a sponge. Share yours with me if you do it, can’t wait to see!