When we remodeled our home, I had champagne tastes and a kool-aid budget. My ceramic artist sensibilities wanted gorgeous tile, with complex glazes, and intricate designs. My father-in-law, who was doing most of the work, providing most of the expertise, and a veteran of his share of ridiculous clients, wanted no-fuss tile that would be easy to go in with a minimum of cuts and frustration. Our budget wanted everything to be free, as in beer.
The compromise we ended up with made all of us pretty happy. The field tile was Big Box Store mass-production, easy and inexpensive. We purchased a few square feet of special designer tile to accent every room. The accents were easy to install and yet made every location with tile extra fun. Nearly a decade later, I’m still thrilled with the choices we made and people comment all the time on how much they like it.
The first thing was the phone camera. I visited every tile store in the area and took pictures of everything I liked. I still have hundreds of pictures like this:
What’s neat about these is that they come glued to mesh backings, so you don’t have to hand-place each of those tiles. It’s a stripe or block that you can place in a stripe-sized hole.
In Practice!
I made this spiff mockup of our mudroom bathroom. The floor tile was a simple dark grey tile from the Home Center, one of the cheapest tiles they sell. (If I remember, maybe $1/sf at the time.) It’s got a pleasing variation and just enough texture to be not slick when wet. The mockup here is made of photographs of the actual real tile, and the dimensions of the room are accurate. The decorative strip was made out of an inexpensive 12 x 12 block of mixed glassy mosaic tile on mesh backing, also from Home Center, cut into strips of 2 x 12 tiles. A photograph was also used to represent it in the mockup. I made a mockup similar to this for every tile location, and fiddled with a lot of possible choices, to get a chance to play with the colors and patterns before we bought anything.
Lessons!
- Cheap tile doesn’t have to be boring!
- You can cut the mesh designs with scissors yourself!
- Design was optimized so we wouldn’t make any cuts just for the design, except for the one corner piece.
- The accent tile would not be appropriate for foot traffic in the 12 x 12 configuration, but in a stripe it’s held up just fine… and our mudroom is not a benign place.
Another example!
The basic idea of “change the tile under the wood stove” I stole from a neighbor. I really like how it sets off the wood stove and also kind of gives everyone a shouted clue about what the safe range is around the fireplace. You know, if you’re on black tile, that you’re in the fire’s personal space, and that it’s bad to be flammable there.
The black tile is black granite, too slippery to be good for regular foot traffic IMHO, but I wanted black for thermal reasons and I liked that it’s polished and that the grout lines are thin for the purpose of cleaning inevitable dirt, dust, and ash. And, I don’t want people walking on it anyway.
The decorative strip is again a fairly cheap mosaic tile from the Home Center, in this case cut into 3” strips from the 12 x 12 block that they sell. There are also neat square glass tiles at the corners, which made the running bond corner problem less confusing.
The field tile is again from a Home Center, a screen printed middle choice that came in both 18” x 18” and 12” x 12”. The subfloor is poured concrete (for thermal mass) so flexion is not a concern. I like the look of the 18” x 18” but they are annoying to cut when things get intricate. So, we made a big central rectangle of the 18” x 18” that required no cutting, and surrounded with 12” x 12” on the edges. The design is more interesting that way and it was also much easier to install.
There is no reason a shower should be boring.
This is my daughter’s bathroom, and I wanted it to be something that suited a 10 year old while also remaining delightful to us all as adults (well, any adults worth having in our house). I fell in love with these dolphins and so imposed them on her.
The layout for this one was possibly the trickiest one we did, because of the constraint of the window.
The stripe was cut from this square:
Then of course, the white tile is just super cheap generic white Home Center tile. But the fancy blue tiles make it look classy. My daughter picked the red paint. When I was a kid I wanted bold colors like this but everyone made me pick off-white tones. I figured it’s only paint if she hated it. She’s still happy with it. The pictures don’t really get the light right, but the final effect is pretty sophisticated.
The floor is a mosaic that you can just buy. It’s the only tile in the house that went in the way the sellers expected/intended.
This shower is in the mudroom, and it’s meant to be a little dual-purpose. It has a heavy duty steel clothes rod that goes high over the top, so you can hang sopping wet jackets and let them drip dry into the shower pan. The dark tile is a fancy dark blue with an art glaze chosen to provide visual contrast and interest to the inexpensive field tile. The field tile is all a single kind, but it comes in these varied shades (again screen printed) on purpose. I seem to remember doing some fancy selecting at the store to get the right mix of the different kinds (the dark tiles were overrepresented), and also, I laid them out before they went onto the wall, carefully arranging each one to have a pleasing pattern of light and dark among the art tiles. Note that the art tiles on the end walls are placed to be centered on the fixtures, which are centered after the shower door is in place.
The most conventional one:
At the end of this project, I didn’t want to walk into a hardware store or tile store ever again! So. Many. Choices. It was exhausting. But I love how it all turned out.