# Forum Home Renovation Tiling  Tile Layout Software?

## Pete F

I wonder if anyone has come across a decent tile layout app? 
Tiles lay down next to each other in a pattern. All I want to do is lay that pattern over a room with any features included in the room and move the pattern around until I can see a layout that looks like it's the best. I currently have a very simple, small wet area and I'm seriously thinking of drawing the room to scale on graph paper, taking another sheet of overhead projector film or similar and drawing the tiles to scale, then simply sliding one over the other until the layout looks ok. However it occurred to me that this was so simple there surely had to be some software that can do that already?

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## John2b

You could do that easily with SketchUp, a free for personal use 3D CAD program. You draw your plan on one layer, then add another layer with the tile overlay. Although SketchUp is reasonably intuitive to use (I used it to design my courtyard patio and tile layout in three dimensions), whether it is worth the effort of learning your way around any CAD program or not for a one off task is another thing. https://www.sketchup.com

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## Pete F

> You could do that easily with SketchUp, a free for personal use 3D CAD program. You draw your plan on one layer, then add another layer with the tile overlay. Although SketchUp is reasonably intuitive to use (I used it to design my courtyard patio and tile layout in three dimensions), whether it is worth the effort of learning your way around any CAD program or not for a one off task is another thing. https://www.sketchup.com

  Thanks John. I actually used to use Fusion 360 quite a lot, but like everything, my brain has only so much space in it (ie not much) and I can't recall how to do what I have in mind.  
I started hunting around for tiling software and came a cross a few, but couldn't get any of them to work for one reason or another. In this case the job couldn't be simpler, a slightly rectangular very small wet room with a single drain in which I'll use a tile insert waste. Both wall and floor tiles look like they're going to be 300 x 300 rectified edge porcelein tiles, so the grout lines from the floor will continue up the walls, indeed the facing wall to the door will have floor tiles continuing up it as a semi-feature/contrast. I can see I can't centre the tiles as it will leave two strips either side, so I'll need to offset them, then the usual compromises come in. 
I'm actually shocked that I wasn't able to find a decent iPad app or similar as I'm certainly not the first to be doing this. My last tiling job was a hallway with quite a few openings and a change of level I needed to blend in. It took quite a lot of time to work out where those compromises were going to be hidden. I'm obviously not a professional tiler so this is the most difficult part for me. I'm also only laying straight patterns and it would be no more difficult to be able to have some quite fancy patterns in software, yet with the simple ability to slide the pattern around a floor plan. I've seen some shocking solutions even from professional tilers in this regard.

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## Pete F

Update: I just found an iPad app called Tiling App for iPad. That seems to do exactly what I wanted to do and it took literally a few minutes to come up with what looks like a potential floor layout. I'll see how that works with the waste, but it's a start. It would be good to see if an app like that could be expanded to easily incorporate odd shaped rooms and different tile patterns. The cost was AU$6. I'll play with it some more to see how it handles features. About | Tiling App

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## Whitey66

Just a word of warning, make sure the area to be tiled is exactly square and even. Nothing looks worse than a small cut of tile on the edge because the wall has a whoop in it.
Measure at several places and check the diagonals, use a laser level if possible.

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## milehigheric

I use a free one just called flooring in the App Store. You can change room layout and tile pattern and it gives you tile count, offcuts etc. My only gripe is it doesnt show relative measurements of tiles to walls etc so hard to work out an exact plan to the mm 
For this reason I have been using this app to get an idea, then use a layered autocad drawing to get measurements.

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## Pete F

Ok thanks, I just installed it and it looks like a better app than the one I was using. The one thing I can't see it taking in to account are features in the room. A good example of that would be a floor waste. That can have a big affect on tile layout. 
If you click on the cut tiles information it provides the relative dimension to the wall etc. I do think it would be a brave person to try to calculate tiles to the millimetre in CAD. In practice the floors/walls are never 100% accurate and you just need to take that in to account when laying the tiles.

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## toooldforthis

> ... In practice the floors/walls are never 100% accurate and you just need to take that in to account when laying the tiles.

  well, first you need to take that into account with the layout to make sure you don't end up with little strips of tiles along an edge.
floor wastes become an issue the bigger the tile so sometimes best to work from them outwards to see what you get.
even grout size can have a big influence on layout 
an old fashioned way I have used is to draw the room & features on some graph paper then overlay it with a transparency that has the tile layout on it, you can move the transparency around over the graph paper to see where your problem areas are.

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## MacGyver69

> I wonder if anyone has come across a decent tile layout app?
> ?

  Sorry, for the late reply but for the benefit of those searching the forums, a more full-featured option to consider is Precision Tile Pro (www.LaurelCreekSoftware.com). It's only available on Windows but lets you import your own tile images, adjust grout width and has many different tile layout patterns to choose from. The one month subscription for $25 is a good option for a one-off project.

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