Tiling can be fun but it is very physical (electricians, plumbers, painters, carpenters, general contractors themselves unless they sub contract are generally unfit for tiling) and messy. Electricians especially think highly of themseves, like intellectuals or mathematicians which gets in the way of tiling in my opinion. Natural tile installers are masons, people working with cement and bricks, ready to get dirty and work on their knees. Preparation is essential and includes protecting surrounding carpeting and wood floors. Tiling a floor is relatively easy and straightforward as you have the luxury of trying different layouts before installing the tile proper.  You can eyeball things on a floor and get away with spacers if you wish. On the other hand tiles can break on a floor and you have to make sure to use the proper setting material, and enough of it, sometimes back buttering each tile, especially large ones. You know you have done a good job when a tile on the floor tings and doesn't sound hollow like when you leave air pockets. In any case it is relatively easy to replace a couple tiles on a floor if you make a mistake, especially when the tiles are installed over a concrete slab: they'll pop right off without ruining your slab. You have to use your brain more when tiling a wall , it is more technical, you have to plan more, you have to use a plumb line but unless a tile falls it is unlikely to brake. On the other end it is often difficult to replace wall tiles and removing them, braking them without damaging the wall behind supporting them: a mistake can be more costly on a wall. Heavy tiles and mesh mounted mosaics will slide on you before they set if you don't know how to do it. You generally start a wall at the bottom, not on top, each tile separated by spacers holding the other one. Grouting is something else. It can be greusome. It is the least rewarding part of tiling. Often contractors will let their helper do it as grouting, then cleaning the tiles and removing grout haze takes time. Never start grouting at 5PM! Remember that you are not on a schedule like a contractor. Grout after you are rested. Grout a week or two weeks after tiling and start early in the morning. Needless to say it is very hard and unpleasant to replace a sanded grout (it dries like concrete) so choose your color carefully.

This is a sensitive issue but I'll say it anyway: when an existing home owner (things are different for someone buying a new property) hires and get a quote from a professional contractor he should never let him attach any string to his quote, like including some cost and a spending limit on tiles, usually very low, let say like $5.00SF, above which price he would charge you more. Never let him buy the tiles for you. Do your own shopping. Sometimes a contractor will want to switch you to a tile carried by an other tile store where they can get a commission. Although some outlets train and reward them like labrador retrievers for bringing in business, a contractor has no real business in buying tiles for you. Buying tiles is not like buying construction material. They have no business knowing how much you spend on a tile. If you tell them they will raise your labour cost accordingly. The cost of installing $5.00Sf 12x12 tile  versus installing $25.00SF 12x12 tile is the same. They want to buy the tiles to hide the real cost of labor in a proposal, not to save you money. They distract you from the real cost of labor to emphasize the cost of tiles which is often a fraction of the total cost of an installation. They want you captive and numb, all tied up and ready to be consumed. There can be no cost benefit for you in involving a third party in buying tiles. Always get a quote for labour only. Always get the square footage your contractrator'quote is based upon. After a quick math you will realize that some people out there charge as much as $60.00SF just for installing tiles while trying to give you a spending limit of only $5.00SF for tiles. Do not tie your hands! There are beautiful tiles out there and I know you can afford any of them. Anyway It should be your decision to spend $5.00SF or $25.00SF on tiles. Now, real estate investors, rehabers and new construction general contrators do buy their tiles, though, and some of them will buy nice tiles to prop up the value of their property but some will actually send their clients to a tile store and let them pick  (and pay somewhat) their tiles, which is fine and different from what I am talking above.  

Walkers are welcome. We don't charge for looking! We know when someone is not ready to buy or not working on a tile project when he tells us we have beautiful tiles. Customers working on something tend to be very focus and rarely shower us with compliments. They don't look at a section of our floor under construction, asking: "are you open?" Actually they walk right in to the mud ruining our tile installation. Some get upset when they can't find a twenty years old replacement tile and get dismissed, like if we would be hiding some old tiles in a corner. Sorry but the tile business has become like fashion with spring and fall collections. There are no "antique" stores in tile. Suppose we would stock everything which is impossible to do in the made to order high end tile business (precious tiles coming in 15 shapes and 80 colors - warehouses can only stock low end material, the high end always coming directly from the manufacturer) left overs would always end up in the bin. Anyway we cannot help you if you need 1SF of this and 3SF of that to make a bracelet or a pendant. We cannot sell individual tiles. We cannot help people working on small projects like a coffe table or people wanting to buy a single tile in ten different colors for a small artistic project since our tiles are mostly sold by the box, making them out of reach for those projects.

Whose "discount"? The best and widest selection of tiles is to be found at high end retailers that order their tiles directly from the source on a cut order basis, lines that are generally exclusive and protected but not all,  as opposed to warehouses that can inventory only a small selection of inexpensive, low end material and seconds, dinosaurs of a bygone era. Today people buy much nicer tiles than in the old days. They want a lot of options, options that are impractical and impossible to warehouse all. Anyway by definition one cannot stock made to order tiles. High end tile shops have either a one price policy or a price structure that includes a discount to the trade, discount that is built in to the price, therefore always higher than the one price shops, typically 40% higher but often more. Yes, at some high end retailer a discount always starts by a markup! It is a costly system that rewards the trade financially but very rarely the end user as the trade would want you to believe. A discount is never passed, otherwise why would they be so adamant about being responsible for buying the tiles for you and putting it on a contract. (You give them a load of cash to buy your tiles, putting all your eggs in the same basket: what about if they disappear or have an accident: how do you replace them?  You are stuck with them, they have your tiles. When you buy the tiles you can always hire someone else, put pressure on them, fire them, and they know it, sue them while you hire someone else to do or finish the job). You want to control things somewhat, not being at the mercy of one contractor in case an installation goes South. But in doing so those stores fidelized and get repeat business from the trade. This system is fraught with abuse and things get out of hand, for example, when a end user cannot get a price at all from a tile shop (until the store can talk first to the professional helping the customer). Aware that some trade people sell at  even higher margins than them, like most general contractors and some architects (but not all),  they protect them. What I advise you to do is to always look at the price proper and stop listening to the music and the romance of a "discount".  

People in Evanston, Wilmette, Winnetka, are extremely kind, wishing us good luck and complimenting us about the space, the location and our selection of tiles but about once a year we get an angry customer leaving the store wishing us bad luck, one of those a self doer recently because we could not help him in the store resolve an installation problem and he got offended. We have seen some strange behaviours in the past usually coming from impatient customers that are not even close to order anything; it comes with the territory. At Tileworks we do encourage people to express themselves in selecting tiles but on the other hand I must say that some of our most challenging customers must be some homemakers with artistic pretensions.