Tile Upgrade Guide for Lake Nona New Construction Homes

New homes keep going up across Lake Nona, and communities like Laureate Park add more every year. Buyers love the neighborhoods, the schools, and the Medical City jobs nearby. The tile that comes standard in those homes is another story.

We are Luong Tile, a family-owned tile and flooring installation company in Orlando with more than 20 years of experience, licensed and insured. Plenty of our calls come from owners planning a tile upgrade in a Lake Nona new build, often within the first year of ownership. Here is what we tell them.

Why builder-grade tile disappoints

Builders are not trying to give you a bad floor. They are trying to hit a price point across hundreds of homes, and tile is one of the easiest places to save money. The result is a floor that photographs fine on walkthrough day and starts to bother you six months in.

• Thin, low-cost tile. Standard packages usually mean inexpensive porcelain or ceramic, often 16x16 or 18x18, in a handful of neutral colors. Thinner tile is more vulnerable to cracking over minor slab movement.
• Minimal pattern options. Straight lay only. No herringbone, no borders, no mosaic accents, because anything custom slows the production schedule.
• Rushed installs. Production crews are paid by the square foot and move fast. That shows up as lippage (uneven tile edges), hollow spots from poor mortar coverage, and inconsistent grout joints.
• Basic grout. Standard cement grout in one or two colors, often left unsealed, which stains and darkens in traffic lanes within the first year.

None of this is a structural emergency. It is a finish level below the rest of the house, and in an open floor plan you see that floor from every room.

Window one: the builder's design center

Every builder gives you a chance to upgrade at the design center before construction starts. It is convenient. The work happens before you move in, and the cost rolls into your mortgage.

The tradeoffs are real, though. The catalog is limited to what the builder's suppliers stock, so you are choosing from a few dozen tiles instead of the full market. Pricing is typically marked up well above retail, and you cannot shop it around. And the same production crews install the upgraded tile on the same compressed schedule, so the workmanship does not change with the price.

If you love a specific design center option and the number works for you, take it. For most buyers, we think the second window is better value.

Window two: after closing, with your own installer

Once the home is yours, everything opens up. You can buy any tile on the market: 24x48 large-format porcelain, wood-look planks laid in herringbone, marble mosaics for the bathroom, handmade-look ceramic for the backsplash. You choose your installer, you check their license, insurance, and past work, and you get a written quote you can compare.

The value difference usually comes down to two things. First, materials: buying tile from a local supplier at retail almost always beats design center pricing for a comparable or better tile. Second, workmanship: a dedicated tile contractor spends days on a floor that a production crew finishes in hours, and that difference shows for the next twenty years.

One honest caveat. Good work is not cheap, and we will not pretend ours is. You get what you pay for in this trade more than most. What we can promise is that our price reflects the actual work involved, and the floor gets done right once.

What a tile upgrade actually involves

Replacing builder-grade tile is more than swapping one tile for another. A proper job in a Lake Nona new build looks like this:

1. Demolition. The existing tile and thinset come up. We use dust containment, because demolition dust travels through an entire house otherwise.
2. Slab prep. We grind off old thinset residue and check the slab for flatness. Large-format tile needs a floor flat to roughly 1/8 inch over 10 feet, so even new slabs often need patching or self-leveling compound in low spots.
3. Layout. We plan the layout dry before mixing mortar: where the pattern centers, where cuts land, and how the tile meets cabinets, sliders, and transitions.
4. Installation. The correct mortar for the tile size, back-buttering large-format pieces for full coverage, leveling clips to control lippage, and movement joints where the field needs room to expand.
5. Grout and finish. A quality grout (we often recommend urethane or epoxy in kitchens and showers because they resist staining far better than basic cement grout), clean caulked transitions, and baseboards reset or replaced.

You can see examples of large-format floors, herringbone layouts, and mosaic work in our gallery, and a full list of what we install on our services page.

Timeline: the sweet spot is between closing and move-in

The best window is the gap between getting your keys and delivering furniture. The house is empty, so there is nothing to move or protect, demolition goes faster, and you are not living in the dust.

As a rough guide, a full first floor of around 1,000 to 1,500 square feet typically takes one to two weeks from demolition to final grout cure, depending on the tile and the pattern. A single bathroom or a backsplash is a matter of days. If you can push your move-in date back even one week, it is worth doing.

Already moved in? Still very doable. We phase the work room by room, contain the dust, and keep part of the house livable throughout. It takes a little longer, but it is common.

What it costs

Every job is different, and we quote each one individually after seeing the space. Honest ballpark ranges still help with planning. In the Orlando area, removing existing tile generally runs a few dollars per square foot. Installation labor for standard layouts commonly falls between $6 and $12 per square foot, with intricate patterns like herringbone at the higher end. Material is on top of that and varies widely, from budget porcelain at a couple of dollars per square foot to natural stone at many times that.

Compare the full number against your design center quote for the same square footage. In our experience, the after-closing route often delivers a better tile, a better install, or both for similar money.

Talk to us before you decide

If you are closing on a new construction home in Lake Nona and the standard tile is not something you want to live with for the next decade, call us at 407-538-1155 or reach us through our contact page. We will look at your floor plan, talk through materials and patterns, and give you a straight quote for doing it right.