My contractor raised an eyebrow when I asked him to tile halfway up my bathroom wall rather than just around my sink. “Wow, that’s a lot of extra work,” he said. Three years later, I’m happy to report it was one of the best decisions I made during my renovation—and not just because it looks nice. Continue reading and you’ll see what I mean.
Setting aside aesthetics for a minute (though they’re important, too), tile up wallchanged the way I use and maintain my bathroom. You know how bathrooms attract mysterious streaks? Facial cleanser droplets.
Teethpaste splatter. That disgusting fog that rolls down from your shower every morning and coats everything?
Tiny outlines of your kids’ toy cars?
Dirt from dirty hands that get tucked into toilet stalls? Because my tiles go up to about four feet high, I can easily wipe down my entire bathroom with a damp rag. No need to touch up paint or scrub at hardened goop when everything rinses clean.
If I had gone with the original plan of 36-inch wainscoting, I might not have taken such good care of those bottom halves of my walls. Believe me, I kept driving myself crazy looking at pictures of options online. It started with a photo I tore from a magazine of an ensuite bathroom from a fancy hotel that used tile all the way up to window height in a simple subway pattern.
It spoke to me. “That would never work in real life,” my husband reassured me (honestly, he was right). But I started thinking: Sure, everyone probably does the wainscoting route, but is that really what’s best for how we live in our house? I went through grout anxiety.
My local tile store carried dozens of different shades of grey grout, and they all looked the same to me in the lighting they had. I printed grout color samples at home and taped them to my wall to examine all day long. I checked how they looked in morning sunlight, afternoon shadow, and evening glow under our kitchen lamps.
Finally I settled on a mid-grey that was light enough that dried soap wouldn’t show, but not so light that my tiles would instantly look dirty. Pattern panic was another mini-crisis for me. Subway is classic for a reason; it never goes out of style.
But laying it straight did not thrill me. Herringbone is where it’s at these days, but I worried about scrubbing at all those intersecting corners every week. I considered boring ol’ stack bond (all the tiles stacked neatly up and down like notebook paper) before my tile installer told me about a pattern called third- stagger.
You lay each row of tile so that it’s offset by a third instead of a half, creating an easy rhythm that’s more interesting than straight subway and tons easier to maintain than herringbone should you need to replace a tile. Now let me tell you about cutoff consternation. If you google images for tile ideas, you’ll see tons of examples of where to end your tiles.
But it still took me ages to figure out where to stop my pattern. I stared at my wall, I measured. I hung painters’ tape at different heights.
I even climbed up on a stepladder to mock- install the tile at what might be eye level for my tallest family member (for the record: my brother, who is 6’4″ and visits twice a year). Stopping the tile above my towel bar—which hangs at about 54 inches from the floor—iside allowed me to create a frame for the mirror and draw the eye upward without overwhelming the space. It also allows me to protect the wall where towels get bumped, dunked into the washer, and rehung.
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Multiple times a day. Believe it or not, agonizing over grout color was kind of fun. Because I knew I wanted to step away from stark white—which was popular about five years ago but feels too cold now—I went with a warm greige instead.
Beigeey-grey. Greyey-beige? Either way, I worried it would date my space by sticking with a trendy color.
But I’ve loved it so much and it really is a neutral that goes with everything! It complements our white trim without fighting with our intentionally bright (sometimes literally trashy) towels. It even makes my space look inviting in the dark mornings of winter and glaring afternoons of summer.
Hang tile too high and it’s bathroom showroom. Too low and it just looks like you didn’t finish the job. I researched the perfect heights for towel bars online before finally deciding I hated them all and would just have to come up with a height myself.
Here’s where that painter’s tape came in handy. My contractor was pretty when I ran out to the store and measured everything himself. Ta-da!
I ended up finishing mine just above the towel bar, since that sits at roughly 54 inches. It frames my mirror beautifully and gives the illusion of height without being overwhelming. Surprisingly, this ended up being one of my favorite parts.
The additional cost for having tile run all the way up my bathroom wall instead of stopping at wainscot style was about $800. Spending an extra $200 on epoxy grout for the shower was totally worth it too. (Not only will it never stain; it basically requires zero maintenance!) And yeah, I still clean my bathroom…but now it’s once a month versus once a week. Shower goggles dump water all over the place; kids toss wet towels on the floor.
I haven’t even painted the hallway closet adjacent to my bathroom since 2019 because I haven’t had to because cleaning my walls is SO EASY.
I actually love the subway pattern I ended up choosing years later. Subway everything has started to look clinical to me lately.
But just off-setting each row like I described above makes it look more interesting without being trendy—say, linen wall coverings or coral accents—in a way that I think will still look dated in a decade. Would I change anything? If I had to do it over, I might have gone with slightly larger tiles.
Yes, my 3×6” subway tiles are adorable, but 4×8” or even 4×12” would have cut down on cleaning time since there are fewer grout lines. And I may have spent the extra money on that epoxy grout all over, not just in the shower. The regular grout I used behind the toilet has darkened a little with age; it’s not dirty or wrong, just noticeable enough to make me cringe.
Ah well. Well, you know about the pee incident. But because I had tiled most of the wall around my bathtub—I was super diligent about every square inch of the shower!—it was an easy fix for the contractors when they came to repair the plumbing and resulting water damage.
They didn’t have to paint or worry about blending in where water had stained the walls; they could just wipe down the tiles and be on their way!
