Tip for Cutting Border Tiles Without Measuring

Joe Truini from DannyLipford.com demonstrates a trick for cutting border tiles without measuring by overlaying one on the other.

Joe Truini: When tiling a floor, if you’ll start at the middle of the room, then work out in all directions that creates a nice balanced tile pattern. But it also means that you need to cut boarder tiles to fit around the permitted room. On this case, you see we have about 2 1/2-inch wide piece of tile. Now you could measure mark each of these pieces separately. .but that’s not only time consuming, it can lead to mistakes as you’re measuring each one. Here’s a technique that professional tile centers use is called the overlay technique. And it requires no measuring at all. Take a full size tile and set it on the last full tile that you put on the floor. That’s the tile we're going to cut, this one here. Now take another tile and put it on top, and slide it tight up against the wall. In this case, I’ve got a cabinet there. Then mark the tile below. This would be our cut line. Now we take this over to the tile cutter, slice that off. In this piece here will become our border. That fits right in there perfectly. Now this technique is great because not only does it work with ceramic tile, with also vinyl tile, and any wide plank flooring you might have whether it’s wood or even laminate.