Tiling away the hours

This morning, instead of working on a book chapter that is due October 31!!!!, I spent several hours choosing tile for the master bathroom. This was not time I minded spending, however, as the tile choices for the bathroom rank right up there in terms of being the most consequential and important. (To me, that is; I'm sure Wagner would regard the truss decision as being more important.)

We called one tile store and said we'd like to stop by, and the lady who answered told us to come on down. [Warning: Mini-rant follows.] When we got there, though, we were met by a sales associate who immediately informed us that "we are very short-handed today" and "it is better if you schedule an appointment." Of course, I'm thinking that we had in fact called in advance and done exactly that. The saleslady waved a hand toward walls of tile samples and told us to look around while she made a few phone calls. Twenty minutes pass, and then she comes out, apologizes again for being so short-handed, and then assures us of all the personal attention she could give us if only we scheduled an appointment... the earliest of which she had available being a week from now. We made the appointment and left, disgruntled, or at least I was disgruntled. I don't mind being told that appointments are necessary. But I mind very much being told over the phone that it is okay to come right over, only to be sent on our way after dangling in the wind for half an hour. Harrumph. [/end mini-rant]

...But the laugh will be on them, because I will be cancelling that appointment and buying our tile from a different store. We drove straight to Louisville Tile (actually, their branch office located in Lexington), where we met for several hours with an extremely helpful woman named Kathy, with the end result being that I have identified all the tile and decorative border choices for the master bathroom and laundry room.

It is a minor miracle I arrived at these decisions so quickly, because there are few places more intimidating and perplexing than a tile store. Walls and display stands are jam-packed with hundreds, maybe thousands, of tile samples in all sorts of materials, textures, and colors. And that's just the basic tile. Also crammed in there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of options for borders (tile mosaics, premanufactured patterned strips, etc. etc.).

Fortunately, Kathy also immediately realized I was feeling way overwhelmed, so she asked a few questions to narrow down the options. Did I want a stone floor or porcelain tile? Or maybe marble? That was easy, actually. Marble was too expensive and too slick; I wanted a tile with a texture where we would be less inclined to slip and fall. Stone floors are dramatic and beautiful, but they require regular sealing, and y'all know my position on sealing: It ain't gonna happen in my household.

So porcelain tile it was. Kathy then guided me to one of the display stands with textured porcelain tiles and asked, without much hope in her heart, if I had any idea as to a basic color scheme. "Yes!" I triumphantly announced. I wanted something that would be compatible with the biscuit colored undermount sinks and whirlpool that we had already ordered. More important, I wanted something the color of soap scum.

You think I jest, but I am deathly serious. While I love the dark, slate-colored tiles that are popular these days, even I recognize that they would be a nightmare to keep clean of water spots and soap scum. And in doing research for this renovation, I came across more than one expert who warned against dark tiles, as they require "considerable maintenance" to maintain a "pristine appearance." So I wanted something in a pale beige-ish color, possibly with pinkish overtones. And, again, something textured, ideally with a mottled appearance to hide spots etc.

As I flipped through the display panels, I paused at one particular choice and said, "This one looks rather nice." Kathy then pointed out that they had a sample shower across the room in that precise tile pattern. Being able to see what it looked like over a large area in a naturalistic context was very helpful, and I liked it even more. It is the Cortesia line produced by American Orlean:


So that's the tile that we'll use for the shower walls and the bathroom floor. For the shower, we'll use 10" x 20" tiles, stacked vertically. That's what was in the shower mockup and it looked elegant, a little different than the ordinary square tile motif. For the floor we'll use 13" x 13" squares. (For the shower floor itself, we're using 2" x 2" squares of a matching color.)

So then Kathy asked "What about a border?" I really liked the looks of those tiny tile mosaics that have geometric patterns in them. But when I asked about it, she told me that all those little mosaics involve stone, which require regular sealing. "Nope!" I said. She then hesitatingly pointed out that it would only require sealing maybe every couple of years, and surely that wouldn't be too big of an effort for me? I assured her that it most definitely would.

At that point I noticed the brochure for the Cortesia line showed a decorative border that was designed for this particular tile. And it was a border that was pleasing, consisting of irregularly sized small rectangles and squares with a fossil motif:


Even better is that I saw that this particular line of tile had a 40" x 40" medallion that could be ordered. They had a sample one installed on the showroom floor, and it was gorgeous:

I fell in love with the idea of having that on the floor of our bathroom, and after a few anxious moments of fiddling with the scale on the floor plan, we determined that the medallion would fit easily in the large open space on the floor between the whirlpool, shower entry, and toilet. Wagner had planned that space there to have a five-foot turning radius to meet ADA accessibility standards. If all goes well, we'll never need to use that space for maneuvering a wheelchair, but I'm happy to have it if it lets me have my pretty mosaic in the floor.

At this point, I knew I had already gone well over budget, but I thought we needed some kind of narrow trim or molding to set off the decorative border in the shower. I spied a few examples that I liked, but Kathy explained that they were stone and steered me to the resin samples. There I picked a wider one for the top of the border that included a leaf design, and a simple, thinner half-round for the bottom of the trim.

By that point, I was tired and hungry and ready to go home. But then Kathy said "Now it's time to pick out the grout!" Turns out that grout comes in about 4,683 colors, most of which are shades of grey or beige. We held up a dozen of them against the tile, and they all looked perfectly fine, so I went with the one Kathy suggested.

It probably goes without saying that I picked the brand of grout that comes with a sealer already blended in. ;-)

Having lost all capacity for decision making at that time, I was ready to leave, when Wagner said "Don't forget you need to pick out a tile for the laundry room." Because I basically did not care what the laundry room floor looked like, he suggested we look at the close-out sale they were having, and I picked a porcelain tile that was going for 99 cents per square foot. It's sort of off-white with greyish streaks running through it. Cheap. And perfect. :)