My contractor gave me a puzzled look when I told him I wanted to tile halfway up the bathroom wall instead of only behind the sink. “Are you sure you want to do that?” he asked. “That’s going to be a lot of extra work.” And it was! But it’s also hands-down one of the best decisions I made in our bathroom remodel – and not for the reasons you’d expect. Tile this high looks amazing.
The light-coloured subway tiles elongate my not-so-tall ceilings, and they add to the crisp, clean vibe I was going for. But tile this high also has a hidden benefit that I didn’t foresee when we first started remodeling. With tiles extending up about four feet on the walls, any splashes from hair products, toothpaste, or stray drops from the shower just wipe right off!
No need to worry about touching up paint or scrubbing out water rings. Honestly, tile had always been part of my plan for this bathroom.
My original plan actually involved 36-inch traditional wainscoting, because, well…don’t most people put tile wainscoting in their bathrooms?
But ever since I tore this bathroom photo from a hotel magazine, I kept staring at how the tile reached all the way up to window height on that bathroom. I loved how crisp it looked, how intentional. My husband rolled his eyes because I obviously had, but I couldn’t help feeling like we were cheating ourselves if we didn’t somehow use tile to make the room function better (read: easier to clean) instead of just making it look pretty.
Spoiler alert: picking grout colour is harder than it sounds. My local tile shop had about a million different shades of grey tile grout, and they all kinda looked the same to me at the store. Back home I taped my Top 5 grout samples to the bathroom wall so I could view them at different times of day.
Did I love that greige in the morning but not at night? Did that warm grey have lipstick stains splattered all over it by lunchtime? You get the idea.
I ended up going with a mid-tone grey that I felt was obscured by soap scum less than the darker grout colours but didn’t make my tiles look dirty. Choosing my tile pattern was another grout-worthiness experience. While subway-plain-and-simple felt safe, it also seemed too boring.
And while I loved the look of herringbone on blogs I read, did I really want all those vertical grout lines gathering bathroom gunk in the shower? I almost went with something called stack bond, which looks like oversized graph paper, before my installer told me about another fun (and easier-to-clean!) option called a third-stagger. When subway tiles are installed with the classic straight-down layout, each row is offset from the one above and below it by half a tile.
With third-stagger, each row is offset by one third of a tile. It adds motion and interest to your tiles without feeling too trendy or busy – and if you need to replace a damaged tile, it’s less obvious than with a herringbone pattern. Weird thing I thought about way too much: Where to end the tile?
I stared at that bathroom wall for WEEKS trying to decide! Too low and it seems unfinished. Too high and all of a sudden you’re installing tile on your bathroom ceiling.
I held up rolls of painters’ tape at various heights until I found “the one.” I even stood on my step ladder and eyeballed it from 6-foot-something-up, because my brother is tall (6’4″ to be exact) and visits us twice a year. I know, I know. But ending my tile about 54 inches up – right around where the top of my towel bar hits – was just perfect.
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Not too high. Not too low. It creates a nice frame for the mirror and gives the illusion of height without dominating the space.
And that height conveniently covers the wall where towels get slapped up and down all day long anyway. Choosing a neutral colour seems anti-climactic, but hear me out. I ended up going with an off-white shade of grey.
Not the icy grey you may have seen all over bathrooms in 2019 but something a few shades warmer with just enough beige undertones to keep it from feeling too clinical. I worried like crazy it would look dated in a few years, but it’s been holding up GREAT. It pairs beautifully with crisp white trim, doesn’t clash with my sometimes-questionable towel colour choices, and makes both bright summer sunshine and dark-and-dreary winter mornings shine!
Extension of tile coverage: Free! Tile pattern, colour, and grout we lucked out and spent about $800 on – but that really wasn’t so bad. Most of that was the extra labour to tile three walls instead of one.
Upgrading to epoxy grout for the shower area only set me back another $200. SO WORTH IT. Trust me, I clean my bathroom walls about once a month now.
If that. Whereas painted walls demand weekly scrub-downs to keep them looking good. And let me tell you…when my toddler nephew decided he “needed to help” me clean the bathroom by spraying the walls from the handheld shower head, life was easy.
I wiped down the walls and changed his clothes. No harm, no foul. When I look at subway tile now, it almost feels TOO perfect.
Straight lines, matching up exactly.
Makes my skin crawl just a little. Which is why I LOVE how the third stagger pattern looks on my walls.
They almost look hand-set, with just enough unevenness to be interesting without feeling trendy in a 2022-kind-of-way. Oh I would’ve loved to use bigger tiles – just for ease of cleaning! Our shower and tub wall are covered in 3×6 subway tile.
Life would be easier if I’d used 4×8 (or even 4×12) tiles. Fewer vertical grout lines to scrub! And speaking of grout…If I had to do it again I probably would have invested in that higher-end grout for the entire bathroom, not just the shower/tub walls.
The builder-grade grout I used behind the toilet is starting to yellow ever-so-slightly, and while it’s not enough to make me want to rip it out immediately, I do notice when I’m cleaning around that area. Water randomly came pouring through our bathroom ceiling a few weeks ago due to an issue with my upstairs neighbour’s shower. The water damage and repairs were no fun at all, but because most of my bathroom walls are tiled, cleanup wasn’t at ALL invasive.
The contractor didn’t have to match paint or worry about staining – I just wiped down the tiles and he went about repairing the leak.
