I just made my last cuts for my new ceramic tile floor and am getting ready to do the grouting. When surveying the floor as a whole it looks nice, but when you get down and look you can tell that some tiles are higher than others (2 amateurs at the beginning) and not all the cracks are uniform.
Do these type of mistakes get noticed very often, or will they be unnoticeable to others? I want to sell my house within 2 years and don't want to have to redo this floor. Thanks.
Jim
It's called "lippage". No floor is ever perfect, so lippage is never zero, but the installer's job is to skillfully minimize it across an imperfect floor. A poor installation will show a lot of lippage just from clumsiness and inexperience.
A critical home buyer, or especially a good home inspector, might be aware of this, and it is easy to spot. However, few home buyers are that critical unless the installation was very badly done. More likely it is the sort of thing they'll notice after living with it for a few months, and regret buying. Chips, stains, dirty grout, are more the sort of thing that most people notice on casual inspection.
Another amateur installation flaw is voids under the tile. Easily detected by bouncing a golf ball around, but not at all visible to visual inspection.
Nobody will notice, at least not if you have natural textured tiles. They might be more noticeable with perfectly smooth tiles.
DH and I did about 330 sq feet of textured ceramic tile last year. When we first finished, we noticed all the imperfections, because we'd had them 2 inches from our noses for several weeks.
We brought in family and friends and had them check it out. Asked them if the noticed anything wrong. Response was always, "No, this looks fantastic!" (yay :).
A year later, now even we can't remember where the imperfections are (except for one or two that I can feel if I scuffle around in socks), and we've since seen several professionally-done jobs where we *could* see the flaws.
I wouldn't worry about it :)
-- Jennifer
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