Tile store and tile installers serving Fort Myers

Choosing tile for Fort Myers from a showroom two hours north

Selection happens at the showroom on 14th Street West, in a morning, where the porcelain, the panels and the wood all stand at full size and a whole house can be settled in one visit. Whoever walks you through the samples and the crew that lays them work for the same company, so nobody further down the line is guessing at what was promised.

Porcelain tile is where most of these conversations start, because it is the floor that shrugs off whatever the weather or the plumbing does next. Where a room wants fewer joints and bigger pieces, the panel lines are a few steps away on the same showroom floor.

Condominium floors, ten storeys up

More than 6,500 Fort Myers homes sit in buildings of fifty units or more, by the same Census count. In a building that size the floor is decided in a fixed order: the association's rules for hard flooring and the underlayment beneath it come first, then the permitted working hours and the service elevator booking, and only after that the tile.

The elevator matters more than people expect. Our large-format porcelain panels run up to 126 inches long, and a panel that will not fit the cab or turn the corridor never reaches the unit. So in a tower we measure the elevator and the route to the front door before a panel size is chosen, and where the building says no, a large tile in the same finish does the job in pieces the elevator will carry.

Dean Park, Edison Park and the older streets

Fort Myers has four designated historic districts: Edison Park, Dean Park, Downtown and Seminole Park. Dean Park alone is about eighty houses, most built between 1916 and the mid-1920s within walking distance of downtown, and the sale listings there still advertise original hardwood floors.

That changes the first question. Where the original wood is sound, the better job is often to keep it in the main rooms and put tile where tile belongs, in the bathroom and the kitchen, with the two surfaces finishing level at each doorway. Where a room does get tile over a timber floor rather than a slab, the structure underneath has to be stiff enough not to flex, and that gets checked from below before the quote rather than discovered when a grout line opens.

Where new wood goes in beside old, an engineered board can be nailed to a wooden subfloor, one of the three ways engineered wood flooring is fixed down; on a slab it is glued instead.

How a job eighty-three miles away runs

There is no Lee County branch, and it is better said here than discovered later. A crew this far from the shop stays on the job until it is finished instead of driving back each night, so the jobs that make sense are whole rooms and whole floors: a condominium end to end, all of a house's bathrooms together, a ground floor in one run. A single hallway repair is better done by someone local, and we will tell you that when you call.

Across the Caloosahatchee, tile and flooring for Cape Coral is run on the same terms, in a city made almost entirely of houses.

Further down I-75, the Naples page sets out how a Collier County job gets planned around the season.