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Nobody buys tile. They buy where the cuts land.

Published 2026-08-22 6 min read

The short answer

The tile is his decision and it is the small one. Where the cuts fall and which wall gets the full tile is yours — decided before any adhesive, and he never sees it happen.

Two bathrooms, same tile, same size, same money. In one of them the eye settles; in the other something is faintly wrong and the owner cannot name it. What is wrong is a half-inch strip of tile beside the door he walks through every morning, and a row that dies into the window reveal at an angle. Nobody in the house will ever say the word setting out. They will just find that room slightly cheap-looking for the next fifteen years.

That difference was decided in about twenty minutes, with a chalk line and a tape, before a single tile was stuck. It is the most skilled thing you do and it is completely invisible in a finished photograph — which is why every tiling website in the country is a gallery of finished photographs and none of them is selling the actual skill.

Same tile, same room, same price. Twenty minutes with a chalk line decided which one you would want.

Show the decision, then hand it over

The move is simple and nobody makes it: put the setting out on the website as a thing you do and a thing the customer gets a say in. Not as jargon — as the question it actually is. Which wall do you see first when you open the door? Where do you stand when you clean your teeth? That corner is where the full tiles go, and the cuts go where nobody looks.

Then say that you will mark it out and photograph it before anything is fixed, and that he can change his mind at that point for free. He almost never will. What he takes from it is that there was a decision, that somebody thought about it, and that the person quoting is not simply going to start in a corner and see where it ends up — which, he now realises, is what happened last time.

The four setting-out questions worth a section each

Four setting-out questions, and why they matter to somebody who will live with the answer. Our own reasoning from the trade.
The question	Why the customer should care
Where does the first full tile go, and which end takes the cut?	It decides whether the room reads as considered or as left over. It costs nothing to get right and cannot be fixed afterwards.
How wide is the joint, and why that width for this tile?	Joint width changes how the whole surface reads, and rectified tiles and pressed tiles do not want the same thing.
What color is the joint going to be in two years, not on the day?	Floors gray off, showers can discolor. Choosing for the day of the photograph is how a room ages badly.
Where do the movement joints go, and are they there at all?	The thing that shows up as cracked joints or a lifted row later. Nobody asks and it is the difference between a floor that lasts and one that does not.

Notice what a page of those four does that a gallery cannot. It teaches him what to ask everybody, which means he goes back to the two cheaper quotes and asks questions they did not expect. You have not criticised anybody. You have simply raised the standard of the conversation, and the person who raised it is the one who sounds like they have done this before.

How to photograph the invisible half

Alongside the finished shots, publish the middle of the job: the chalked-out floor before anything is fixed, the membrane in a shower before it is covered, the batten holding the first row level. Those photographs look unglamorous and they are the ones that get you the job, because they are the only images on any tiling site in your town that a customer cannot get from a supplier’s brochure.

Caption them like a person, not a specification. “This is the boring photograph. It is also the reason the row beside your bath will be a full tile.”

The setting-out block — copy it and put your own photographs of a chalked-out floor beside it

Heading, in his language: “Before we stick anything down, we mark it out — and you get to look.”
What it is, in one sentence: “Setting out is deciding where the first whole tile goes, which means deciding where the cut ones end up. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between a room that looks considered and one that looks like it was started in a corner.”
The questions we will ask you: “Which wall do you see first when the door opens? Where do you stand at the basin? Is there a window reveal or a threshold that has to look right? Whatever you answer, that is where the full tiles go.”
The promise: “We chalk it out, photograph it, and send you the picture before any adhesive comes out. If you want it shifted, we shift it — at that point it costs nothing. After the first row, it costs a day.”
The one about joints: “We will tell you the joint width and why, and we will show you the color dry rather than wet — grout looks like a different color wet, which is how people end up with a floor they did not choose.”
The honest limit: “Some rooms cannot be made even at both ends — old walls are rarely square and something has to give. When that is the case we will tell you where we are putting the problem, and why we chose that wall.”

The last line is the one that earns trust, because every experienced tiler knows most rooms are out of square and every customer has been told otherwise by somebody. Naming where the problem is going to be put — before it exists — is the most professional sentence available in this trade.

What to take off

The supplier photographs. A hundred beautiful bathrooms that were tiled by somebody else in another country prove nothing about you and are on every competitor’s site as well, often the same ones. Six of your own rooms, each with a chalked-out shot beside the finished one, will do more work than the hundred — and the caption under each is where you sound like a tradesman rather than a catalogue.