tiles - ceramic v porcelain etc

Hi all

can anyone give me advise as im now trying to select my tiles

ive been told to go porcelain because they are stronger, but then ive read that polished porcelain tiles are bad.

can anyone shed some light on this?

I believe porcelain tiles are less porous so they're easier to keep clean. Porcelain tiles have many different finishes.

We have chosen sealed, semi-polished porcelain tiles for our build. They're not high shine/glossy so they won't look dirty as quick and because they're sealed they're much less porous so they're easier to clean.

Porcelain look much better than ceramic...
However, even though you can get rectified porcelain rather cheap these days - don't forget they will cost an extra $30ish a meter to lay.

yeah i don't think were going for rectified. but an extra $30 a metre to lay?

wow.

has anyone had any issues with the optical hazing on porcelain tiles? is it just on the polished porcelain or on all porcelain?

Yep-rectified have a 1mm grout line and take a lot more skill/time to lay. It's much easier to hide imperfections in a 4mm grout line.

is rectified really an extra $30 a metre to lay.

I could image it would take say an extra 5 to 10 minutes per metre. That is a massive hourly rate! For a skilled tiler it would hardly be much longer at all would it?

Our tiler quoted an extra $14/sqm for rectified porcelain tiles, mainly covering the cost of the wedges to hold the tiles level, and the extra time needed to get a perfectly even join and level height for the tiles.

Basically, the extra money is paying for the tiler to be more careful and to avoid imperfections, along with the tools needed to do so. That's not a bad thing at all.

yeah $14 is reasonable. I forgot about the plane the tiles are laid in, I was just thinking about the edges lining up.

Also depends on the size of the tiles.. 600*600 or 1200*600 cost more than smaller sizes.

oh ok. understandable. can you get porcelain tiles that aren't rectified?

we were going to go 600x600 but then thought it would look weird with only 1 and a half tiles width in the hallway