Clearance living and dining room tiles
Large open floors, which is where clearance stock is hardest to buy and most worth buying. The area is big enough that the saving is substantial, and big enough that running short is a genuine problem.
Buying living and dining room tiles: what actually matters
A living floor is usually the largest continuous area in the house
A living and dining floor is often the largest single tiled area in a house, and it is usually continuous, so there is no natural break where a second batch or a different tile could take over. Measure carefully, add realistic wastage rather than optimistic wastage, and check the remaining square metres on the product page against your number before you fall in love with a line. Every page here shows exactly how much is left.
Large format means fewer joints and a much flatter substrate
A 600x1200 floor looks calm because there is so little grout in it, and every millimetre of unevenness in the slab shows up as a lipped edge because there is no joint nearby to take it up. Large format on an older slab almost always means self-levelling compound first. Get the floor checked before ordering: if it needs levelling, the tiler may recommend a different size, and changing your mind after the pallet arrives is not an option on clearance stock.
How much to over-order, and why 10% is usually the wrong number
Ten per cent is the figure everyone repeats and it is only right for a simple rectangular room laid square with a large format tile. Straight lay in a plain room runs closer to 7 to 10%. A diagonal or herringbone lay wastes far more on the perimeter cuts, so 15 to 20% is realistic. Small formats and mosaics waste more again as a proportion. Rooms with lots of edges, a hob, a niche, a stepped floor, push it up. Because this stock does not come back, round up to the next whole box and then add one more: a spare box costs less than the tile and stops a single cracked tile in year three becoming a whole new floor.
No two batches are exactly the same shade
Tiles are fired in batches and no two batches are exactly the same shade. The difference is usually invisible in the box and obvious across a finished floor in daylight. Where a supplier has told us how many batches make up a line, the product page says so, and it says how big the largest single batch is: that is the largest area you can lay with no shade variation at all. Where they have not told us, the page says nothing rather than guessing. If you are laying one continuous floor, buy within one batch or accept that you are mixing, and if you are mixing, open several boxes at once and lay from all of them rather than box by box, so any variation reads as texture instead of a seam.
Why this stock is such good value
Clearance tiles are not seconds. Everything here is first grade. It is cheap because it is finite: a line an importer is clearing, a colourway a manufacturer has stopped making, or the tail of a container that nobody wants to keep warehousing. The catch is not quality, it is that you cannot get more. On a normal tile you can go back in six weeks for another two boxes. Here you cannot, so the quantity you order is the quantity you will ever have.