Well, There You Are 13 sq. ft. of Tile

We ordered our tile a while back. Though we're not anywhere near tiling (we're not even working on the bathroom right now), I've been able to take on more jobs than normal, so we figured we might as well buy as much stuff as we can for the bathroom now while we're making extra money.

In our tile order was 153 square feet of our (beautiful) white, beveled subway tile (swoon)

9 boxes of tile arrived at our house and found themselves a messy home in our front room

Over Super Bowl weekend we organized things (not just the tile, do you see how messy that room was?) And we counted and made sure we had all 9 boxes of our order. But looking at it, it just didn't seem right that inside only 9 boxes was 153 sq. ft. of tile. So I did some math.

Inside each box is 124 pieces of individual tile

And it takes 8 pieces of subway tile to make up 1 sq. ft.

So if there are 8 tiles per sq. ft. and 124 pieces per box, that means there's 15.5 sq. ft. per box. Multiply that by 9 boxes and you get 139.5, which I rounded to 140. That means we had 13 sq. ft. (that we paid for) that were missing.

So I called up buytile.com. The lady I spoke to didn't really get what I was saying to her. She said "the manufacturer says that there are 17 sq. ft. per box, so you got the 9 boxes you ordered." To which I replied, "well, their math is wrong because there's not 17 sq. ft. per box, there's 15.5" She of course didn't believe it, so we walked through the math together.

Surprise. I was right.

She said she'd have to call the manufacturer again (at this point the calls to buytile had lasted 2 days). I said I either wanted my additional 13 sq. ft. or a refund for the sq. footage I didn't get but paid for.

Two days later (and no call, despite a promise of a call) I got an email from buytile saying my order had been updated. My order? The order I made over a month ago? There were no details of how it had been updated, just that it had indeed been updated. I assumed this meant I was getting more tile?

Nearly 2 weeks after that email (and much effort made by me to not call and ask what was going on) another box arrived at our door: our missing 13 sq. ft. of tile!

Yay! I was super grateful that they corrected the order and shipped us the right amount of tile, but it definitely made me realize that I need to triple check any orders I get from them to make sure they're correct. Especially if we ever order tile from Northeastern Tile (the manufacturer). I mean, how can you have it WRONG of how much sq. ft. is in each box of your tile? And, you can't argue it's the grout line that makes up the difference because I measured the tile and it's actually smaller than 3x6. It made me feel bad for anyone else that's ordered tile from them and didn't double check and maybe had to reorder because they didn't have enough. So, lesson of the story: Buyer beware --> double check your orders, and check a product's comments because we made sure to comment on that one.