Tile Troubles? How to fix a big tile mistake with a small budget.

We've all been there - you have your dream design in mind, meticulously select your materials, and then when it all comes together, it's just not right. That's exactly what happened to me during my recent bathroom renovation.

For this bathroom, I was moving quickly and doing all material selections remotely (I do NOT recommend this). When I arrived at my first site visit, the bathroom that I envisioned in my mind - traditional checkerboard floors with neutral walls that almost felt "spa-like" - felt chaotic, busy and looked like a design mistake.

How did this happen?

My biggest mistake was that I was moving too quickly and skimped on getting the proper size of samples from the tile supplier. The samples I received were really small (2x tiles total) - both of which were more white/neutral in color and less pink/yellow toned.

See material selection board below:

Looks very different than the end result, right?

So, lesson #1, make sure you ask for a large amount of samples from the supplier. Ideally, you would want to create a 1'x1' board that you glue the tile to to allow you to really get an idea of what a full wall of the tile would really look like.

What/How do you fix a tile mistake?

Immediately I called my contractor and tile installer to figure out the cost to select new tile and have it installed. To my surprise, the cost to redo this tile was well over $10K - closer to $13K excluding the cost of the new tile.

This was devastating to me as an extra $13K was not in our budget nor was the timing going to work with us rushing towards a completion date. I tried to get myself to love the tile I selected, but since this was one of my first renovations that I really wanted to be proud of, I just could not do it.

Then I remembered an Instagram reel I saw a few weeks back by LoneFox. In this video, Drew does a "no demo reno" on his bathroom and WOW the results are amazing.

I quickly started doing research on Concretta, a water-resistant plaster that can be applied directly onto existing tile. Concretta comes in a huge variety of different neutral colors including tans, browns, reds, blacks.

My contractor had never heard of this product but thankfully they were willing to read/watch tutorials to learn how to use Concretta to help solve this major design mistake.

After 2 days of plastering and one day of sealing, the bathroom had totally transformed into what I had originally imagined for the space and for a fraction of the price (less than $1k in supplies + $1k in labor). After watching the contractor do the plaster, I'm confident I could have done this on my own and completed this transformation for under $1k but doing this renovation remotely made DIY things such as this harder to do.

Final results below - let me know what you think!