A lighter, smarter approach to showcasing tile layout for your next project, without the weight of traditional plywood boards
If you've ever lugged a heavy tile sample board to a job site, you already know the pain. Traditional boards made of plywood or hardy backer do the job, but when you scale up to a four-by-four tile layout, you're suddenly dealing with a board that's nearly impossible to transport without a second person and a lot of goodwill.
To celebrate the launch of our soon-to-come high-fired terracotta tiles, we wanted to create a sample board that truly does them justice: a full 4×4 layout, two grout color options, and a presentation piece impressive enough to take anywhere. The challenge? Keeping it light enough to actually move.
Here's exactly how we did it: 50 lbs is kind of the max for something you're going to be transporting. Any bigger or heavier, and it just needs to be mocked up on site.
- Why Traditional Boards Don't Scale
- The Material that Changes Everything: Wedi Board
- What You'll Need
- Step-by-Step: Building the Board
- The Results
- Pro Tip on Grout
- When to Go Big (and When to Mock Up on Site)
Why Traditional Boards Don't Scale
For smaller sample boards, like the 16"×6" framed boards we typically use at Clay Imports, plywood works perfectly well. The weight is manageable, and the result is clean and professional.
But a 31"×31" board? A plywood or hardy backer base at that size becomes a real problem. You lose the portability that makes sample boards useful in the first place. We needed a smarter substrate.
The Material that Changes Everything: Wedi Board
The secret to this build is Wedi board, a foam-based building panel typically used for shower surrounds and wet area installations. It performs similarly to a concrete board structurally, but at a fraction of the weight. Three half-inch sheets of Wedi board stacked together weigh only about 4 lbs. That's the entire subbase.
Why three layers?
Three sheets of ½" Wedi board give you 1½" of substrate thickness, plus about ½" of tile depth, resulting in a finished board that's 2" thick and surprisingly rigid, with a tile-flush edge that hides the foam completely.
What you'll Need
- Wedi board (×3 sheets): Cut to ~30⅞" × 30⅞" each
- Construction adhesive: We used Loctite PL Max
- Foam board screws + washers: Specially designed for foam panels
- 3/16" tile spacers: Standard for terracotta tiles
- Thinset adhesive: To bond tile to substrate
- Mapei Flexcolor grout: Pewter + Wicker shown here
Step-by-Step: Building the Board
- Lay out and measure. Arrange all 16 tiles in a 4×4 grid with 3/16" spacers between each tile. Measure the full layout. Ours came to 30⅞" × 30⅞". This is your board size.
- Cut three Wedi board sheets to the same dimensions, cutting them just a hair smaller than your tile layout so the foam stays tucked behind the tile face and doesn't show from any angle.
- Glue the sheets together. Apply construction adhesive to two faces of the three boards, keeping it away from the edges so it doesn't squeeze out. Stack them, slide them slightly side to side to spread the adhesive evenly, and align all three corners as closely as possible.
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Screw the stack. Use foam board screws with washers; these distribute the tension across the surface without tearing through the foam. Let the adhesive cure before moving on.
- Set the tiles. Apply thinset to the board and install your tiles with 3/16" spacers. Our layout used a checkerboard pattern of two terracotta tones, four of each, a great way to show off color variation in a larger format.
- Grout and finish. We applied two grout colors, Mapei Flexcolor in Pewter and Wicker, split across the board. Flexcolor is ideal for sample boards because it stays slightly flexible and resists cracking if the board flexes during transport.
The Results
- 50 lbs: Total finished weight
- 35 lbs: Tile weight alone
- 15 lbs: Board + thinset + grout
Sixteen tiles of high-fired terracotta. Two grout colors. A 31"×31" board you can carry with one arm. The Wedi board substrate, thinset, and grout combined came to just 15 lbs, which is extraordinary for a board this size.
Pro Tip on Grout
Showing two grout colors side-by-side is one of the biggest advantages of a large sample board. Colors that look dramatically different on a small swatch can appear nearly identical once they're installed at scale. Sampling on the actual board eliminates that guesswork entirely.
When to Go Big (and When to Mock Up on Site)
A board like this is ideal for presenting to clients, bringing to job sites, or displaying in a showroom. That said, 50 lbs is roughly the upper limit for a board you'll be transporting regularly. If your project calls for even larger formats or heavier tile, the better approach is to mock it up directly on site rather than build a portable board.
For anything in that 30"–36" range, though, this technique delivers a presentation-quality result at an actually manageable weight, and that makes all the difference.
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