How to Round Tile Corners

First off, thank you so much to everyone's kind comments yesterday on our master bathroom's tile progress! We're so happy with how it turned out, and love that you all agree!

We decided not to share a full tutorial on how to tile, because there are so many great ones out there already. What we did want to share with you was something that we had to research A LOT, because it's not something that people typically do when tiling.

How to Round Tile Edges and Corners

In most homes, both DIY'ers and professionals alike add trim edging or a thin piece of rounded tile to give tile a finished look. While this is fine and grand if you like that look, we decided we didn't like it. I didn't want a thin line of trim around my entire shower walls. And I didn't want to add edging to my tub surround because I felt like it would look awkward. I wanted a smoother, cleaner look.

So after much research and some trial and error on Justin's part, we figured out how to round our own tile edges for a nice and clean, finished look.

Tools & Materials Needed:

Here's how we did it:

Using a 3/16" radius brazed diamond router bit with 1/2" shank on your Router, round the edges and/or corner on your tile. Keep in mind you only want to round the exposed corners or edges of your tile. Any edges that will be filled by grout do not need to be rounded. 

Here you can see a nice round edge to our tile. After this first cut, this edge will be very rough, and dull.

To smooth the rounded edge, sand the edge using 100 grit sandpaper on your orbital sander. Make sure to fully sand all angles of the rounded edge. 

Here's a shot of the tile after sanding the rounded edge. This image isn't really doing the tile justice, but the sanding has smoothed out this round edge.

The last step is to polish the tile. You'll notice that the edge is a dull white color instead of the glossy, beautiful marble color that it should be. Using a 6" variable speed dual action polisher and our handy-dandy little squirt bottle full of water (to keep the tile wet), Justin polished the rounded tile edge twice. First with 1500 grit diamond polishing paper, then with 3000 grit diamond polishing paper.

Polishing this twice really helps bring the shine out in the tile.

Here's what the tile looked like after two rounds of polishing. You can see how the glossy, marble colors and just as strong as in the rest of the piece of tile. It looks natural, as if the tile was made that way.

And here's what it looks like when it's set. I love how much cleaner this look is vs. the tile edging that is typically done for tile edges.

Justin made me promise to tell you that this process takes a LONG long long time. It felt like we were tiling for years. Even though it did take about 4-5 extra hours to round all of this tile (we had around 50 pieces of tile we had to round for the shower walls, shower step and tub surround) we're so happy with the way it looks that we both agree, it was totally worth the extra time that we Justin gave. It looks SO great in person.

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