When I painted the floor tiles in our powder room (see my post on how to paint a tile floor for details), I LOVED the result but wasn’t sure how long it would last. We lived with our painted tile floor for four years before selling our house to move to NC so I decided it was time to share a four year later update! (post includes commissionable links; for more information, see my full disclosure statement {here})
As a reminder, this is what the tile floors in our powder room looked like originally:
And here’s a pic of our powder room floor after it was painted:
Looking good right?! Overall, I am VERY happy with how our painted tile floors held up! Let’s zoom on in so I can show you in detail how they’ve worn.
The most heavily trafficked areas of this bathroom were the area where you walk in, in front of the sink, and in front of the toilet. The first two areas look pretty much the same four years later as when they were first painted. Here’s a close-up of the tile in front of the sink:
I was initially having issues with getting the painted tile totally clean in these high traffic areas but then realized that lightly scrubbing with {these Mr. Clean Magic Erasers} does a great job of removing the grime without removing the paint. So much so that I was kind of appalled at how dirty the magic eraser was the first time I tried it on my “clean” floors. I wouldn’t recommend using Magic Erasers for regular weekly cleaning (warm water and mild soap will do the trick for that) but it’s a great secret weapon to use on occasional built-up grime.
The area in front of the toilet is the one area that showed some wear with several small scrapes on one of the tiles and some teeny little marks on a few others that you’d only see if you were looking for them:
The scrapes occurred on a day when we were having yard work done and a few of the guys used this bathroom (I’m guessing that one of them had a stone in his work boots). Some of the teeny marks were likely just wear and tear from use over time, as everyone who worked on our before and after kitchen remodel used this bathroom.
Fortunately, the scrapes and marks were easy to fix! Shortly before selling our house, I sanded the marks smooth with fine grit sandpaper, cleaned our entire floor, and re-coated it with two coats of paint. It looked new again!
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So would I still recommend painting your tile floor? Absolutely! Overall they wore really well and touching them up was quick and easy. So if you paint your tile and don’t use a top coat (which is what I did), plan on re-coating your floors every few years to keep them looking great. If you don’t want to have to re-coat your floors that frequently or have floors that are going to be extremely trafficked, consider putting a coat or two of water-based polyurethane over your last coat of paint when you do your project.
Have any questions? Ask away!
