Painting over bathroom wall tiles....

Hi,

I've done both before (painted & replaced).

Painting - definately an easier/quicker option, with less skill required. We used the White Knight product (primer/top coat) and worked well. Good coverage, nice finish - gloss or matte. I wouldn't recommend it for high wear areas - like flooring - but if it's just getting a splash from the shower then should be fine. Probably worth double checking with the manufacturer. At the end of the day it will look good - but painted.

Replacing tiles - you can chip out the tiles - you need to be really careful, not only of the surrounding tiles, but also of damaging the sheeting they're stuck to. If you damage that then it needs to be replaced before re-tiling. Once this is done, you'll need to glue the new tiles in and try and grout with a matching color. You may also find difficulty finding matching tile color.

Unfortunatley, you can't buy a small pot of the tile paint (that I found), but if you're happy to spend the $40/$50 on 4L then you can always buy and try on some sample tiles first. This will be your cheapest & easiest option if you're happy with the end result.

I inherited a bathroom with painted tiles and it looked so dreadful, I stripped out the entire bathroom and started again.
If you are only painting a strip of tiles, it will probably look even worse than painting the whole lot, which looks awful in my opinion.
If you want to try the paint and risk the cost, you could do that and then if you hated it, you could either stip off the paint with paint stripper, or try and chip out the tiles (but you would have probs matching the colour with the rest) or forget the paint and get in a tiler to replace the strip with a contrasting colour that you like.
Or you could just leave it, 'cos a painted strip, or chipped mismatched replacement may look worse than just leaving it.
And if you think you might want to replace the whole lot: in my case the villaboard (cement board) came off with tiles which meant completely re-lining the bathroom - so re-tiling a bathroom can end up being a very big job.

I had my bathroom tiles refinished by someone and about 1 yr late the paint was chipping off so now we are having to redo the whole bathroom which is going to cost us the same amount we paid to have someone refinish it. So I would just redo the bathroom and not waste my time painting the tiles

Originally Posted by webnola

... we are having to redo the whole bathroom which is going to cost us the same amount we paid to have someone refinish it....

I think you were massively overcharged if a paint job cost you the same as new tiles, grout, glue & someone to lay them...