I agree. It's terribly difficult to mess up subway tile, whether you use hand-made pricey tiles or the cheapie ones from Lowe's like I did in my recent renovation. I am also on the gray grout bandwagon, it gives the wall of tile more visual texture.

http://rebuildingurbanenvironments.blogspot.com/2011/01/projects-as-of-late.html

Love, love, love, love, love.

(Nice job, BethAM!)

Once again, a timely post from AT. I am about to embark on laying subway tile and am grateful that I can always turn to the AT folks for references and inspiration. Thank You.

I love love love subway tile! When we redo our bathrooms we're going to use subway tile, hopefully from floor to ceiling!

love the kilim bath mat among all that crisp white.

LOVE subway tile! We're planning to use it in our guest bath.

Does anyone have experience taking bath tiles down in order to put up new tiles? I hear it can be difficult and am undecided about whether to dive in... thanks

Love them, but not to the ceiling, 30 cm under looks better to me

love the subway tile look! I like it in the kitchen too!

e10 - I removed old tile by just popping off the tiles with a chisel and hammer. They were glued on sometime in the 60s, so they basically fell off. If they used mortar, you'll have alot more bashing to do. Is there a spot you could test to see how they com off?

I love it too, especially with dark grout!

Love subway tile, and I especially love how in the first picture, they hung two glass doors on a hinge instead of a curtain....such a clean and modern look juxtaposed with the subway tile.

Ditto. I can't get enough of it either. I like it in restaurants, in kitchens, in bathrooms, and on a boat.

In my apartment, I pulled the sheet rock down to expose brick and what I saw made me lose my breath, I was so happy: there was subway tile wainscoting on the brick wall, original from 1900. Now I just have to figure out what to do about all the plaster above it.

I love the subway tile!!!! If I could it would be on my bathroom and kitchen! You guys are totally right, white or dark grouting looks great with this tile!

Subway tile is nice, but I think it needs something to warm it up.

Sigh. I guess I've just spent too much time in subways to love this look. It reminds me of waiting, boredom, and rats eating pizza.

e10 - it depends on how your original tiles were installed - in mortar or thinset (which is better for longevity, but harder to remove) or mastic (which is basically glue - not good in a wet environment). If your tiles were set with mortar or thinset, the tiles will be harder to remove and chances are your walls will come down with the tiles. Around a bath/shower you want to ensure you have the proper sub-strata, so you'd want to take down the walls and put up cement board anyway. Drywall or plaster under tile is just asking for trouble - if it should get wet for any reason, it will distintegrate. Cement board will stand up to the rigours of a wet environment.

Re-doing tile around a tub/shower is not for the faint of heart - you need to do your research to make sure you use the proper materials and do the job right (the demolition is the easy part, believe me! Putting it all back together is the hard part.) It's a big job and takes a long time, especially for an amateur, so you don't want to go through all the trouble, only to find out a couple years later the whole thing needs to be redone because of moisture damage.

However, depending on how hideous the bath is to start with, how motivated you are to do the work and how much attention you can pay to all the details, it can be worthwhile. Just be prepared for it to take a lot longer and be a lot more work than you may have ever imagined (I speak from personal experience - our diy bathroom gut job left us without a shower for 11 months). The inconvenience of living in a construction zone for an extended period of time can really make you question your sanity in even starting such a project - make sure you're up for the job before getting in over your head. That being said, now that it's done I'm glad we did it - I love how pretty our bathroom is now and I feel really proud that we did it all ourselves. Plus, doing it ourselves meant we had the budget to splurge for handmade subway tiles and fancier fixtures than we otherwise could have done.

I like the dark grout too. Just a word of caution: make sure you don't let the grout line on the inside corners get to wide as it won't look great! Also, careful tile trimming and tidiness is a must as any inconsistencies will be made more obvious by the grout lines.

*drool*...I adore subway tile in virtually any application. Actually, all applications...haven't seen subway tile I don't like yet.

I actually just wrote a blog post myself about all the different ways you can set white subway tile here: http://tiletramp.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/10-creative-ways-to-use-subway-tile/

I don't usually like spamming comment sections, but since you seem to share this love with me, I thought you might enjoy it :)

Cheers!

The woodwork in that last bathroom is brilliant.

We have beautiful green and black subway tile in our San Francisco rental apartment. Our shower-over-tub was obviously only a tub at one point, because there were two prominent towel bar holders in there. I'd hit my funny bone on one of them one too many times while showering. So yesterday I knocked them out with a mallet; unfortunately, the adjoining tiles cracked. No biggie, I thought - go buy more. I had no idea how hard these would be to replace! Ug.