Pacifica Bath, January 2026

This is the downstairs bathroom in the same Pacifica building as the upstairs bath, the one guests use. Since it’s the bathroom visitors see, the owner wanted it to match the level of finish he’d brought to the rest of the space.

The old floor was a rubberized vinyl in a raised penny pattern, laid over a heating element. It’s the kind of floor you find in commercial and industrial spaces. It’s durable and easy to hose down, but it doesn’t say “home.”

The before-and-after speaks for itself. The new floor is a very elegant large-format porcelain tile, two feet by two feet. Tiles that size make a room feel calm and open: fewer grout lines, fewer breaks in the surface, and a clean, continuous look. Porcelain is also dense and water-resistant, and it’s durable enough for a high-traffic guest bath without the sealing natural stone requires.

Big tiles demand a flat base and careful setting. With a two-foot tile, any dip or crown in the subfloor shows up as lippage between tiles, so the floor has to be checked as each piece goes down to keep every edge flush with its neighbors.

The tile itself came at a great price. I believe I picked it up as excess from another contractor’s job, which meant a premium-looking floor for a fraction of what it would normally cost. It’s a good example of how the best look isn’t always the most expensive one. Sometimes it just takes knowing where to look.

The result is a guest bathroom that finally matches the rest of the building: clean, elegant, and finished to a residential standard rather than an industrial one.