Back to earth

I had talked in an earlier post about selecting the tile for the master bath and how I had selected a beautiful layout, complete with 40" x 40" mosaic medallion to install on the floor and elaborate decorative trim to go in the interior of the shower, around both arched shower doorways, and around the whirlpool tub area.

We are now getting to the point in the renovation where the drywall is ready to go up, and seeing as we had a more definite idea about interior layouts and measurements, Wagner thought it would be a good idea to go revisit Louisville Tile and get the order processed.

Well, that was an exercise in reality-testing. During my first visit, when I had made all the selections, there was one teeny-tiny little detail I had forgotten to ask about, namely, how much all of this stuff cost.

Uh-oh.

Turns out that it costs a lot. A whole lot. Take the decorative border. I had planned on a top border with a little leaf motif, about 2.5" wide, then a 3" decorative trim that matches the mosaic medallion for the tile, and then a half-inch bullnose trim below that. Taken together, those three little trims cost something like $70 a linear foot. Yes, per foot. And the big floor medallion was hideously expensive. Yikes.

It was time to rethink. I thought, briefly, about skipping the floor mosaic. But I had really, really fallen in love with it, and I rationalized it to myself by saying that in the broad scheme of what we were paying for the renovation, the floor mosaic was a mere fraction.

So we're keeping it.

The decorative trim was another matter. I knew I wanted the trim, but maybe I didn't need to have it go all the way around the whirlpool area and I could just keep it in the shower. And maybe I didn't need to use the expensive 3" trim that matched the floor mosaic. So I looked around and found a plainer trim with a leaf design that could work, and I found a cheaper bullnose. (It disturbed me greatly that the half-inch bullnose trim was within a couple of dollars as expensive as the much fancier, wider top decorative border I had picked out.) But the more I thought about this alternative version, the less I liked it. Kathy had noted that the new trim was all the same bland color and thus wouldn't represent as nice a decoration as would the original trim, which was multi-colored (and designed specifically for the tile we had chosen).

So then I went to Plan C. I decided we only needed trim on the exterior of the first shower arched doorway, and we would leave the interior arch (the one that separates the drying off area from the shower proper) plain. And then I realized that I didn't really need that bottom half-inch bullnose border, either; I think it will look good just to have the top border and the matching 3" decorative trim, and then go straight to tile. That will save us about 1/3 on the trim costs.

And then I resorted to Plan D, which was to ask Jonathan across the dinner table, "Don't you agree that we should make the bathroom look really nice and the way we want it to, even if it means we go over budget and have to pay a little more?" My wonderful hubby just laughed resignedly and said "yes."

Gosh, I love that man. :)