Day: May 21, 2015

shadesofmauve:

pyoorkate:

shadesofmauve:

eleneripenneth:

shadesofmauve:

eleneripenneth said: Good luck in tile hell! (There’s no bitterness there after our bathroom remodel, no…)

LOL, do you have a particularly bad experience I should learn from?

YES. 

And it is…. NEVER go tile shopping with a husband who’s an engineer, who neither makes decisions quickly, is prone to sticker shock more than I am (which is a LOT), and who isn’t particularly adventurous past the beige realm.

Eight years later, and I still weep going past tile stores…. ;)

Considering we’re talking about an industry that already caters to ‘any color as long as it’s beige"… ugh. I feel your pain. I’m actually in that exact stage of tile hunting right now. “Pick something that you’ll live with for ten years or more, no pressure!”

I want something with mixed browns and grays, like some slate, but in ceramic or porcelain and a smoothish finish (art studio, here – I need cleanable!). I had no idea brownish and grayish was such a huge scary leap from the Land of Beige, but the flooring industry apparently thinks so, and thus doesn’t provide many options.

I got mail-order samples from one place and I LOVE one of them, but it’s a 12 inch square sample of a high variation tile, so I have basically zero idea of what it would look like on a 190 sq ft floor.

Advice:

Never get cheap tile. The first time I tiled I used nice tile, but it was the first time I’d tiled… it came out pretty good (and I made tetris patterns in the kitchen tiling, which was awesome). The second time I tiled I used cheap tile from B&Q, I think. White, square, ceramic tile.

Only having talked to a tiler, part of the reason it was such a spectacular mare of a job was because cheap tiles are cut / made to much wider tolerances, which means it’s really hard to get a decent looking finish.

One thing I found that’s really odd to me, in the UK you can get natural tile (our kitchen is tiled with Travertine which was wayy cheaper than buying anything but the most grotty ceramic tile and looked way nicer. Our last house we did in slate, which again, was cheaper than ceramic. When I was last in the States, Kathryn’s mom was looking at tile – and all the natural stone stuff seemed way more pricey than ceramic which was confusing (and distressing to me, for future planning). Anyhow, the reason I mention this, is that cheaper natural stone tends to have quite a lot of variation in thickness, and it’s pretty hard to lay really, really flat*. So if you want a really, really flat floor that might not be ideal for you. Or you might be way better at laying tile than me / my builder (or have way more patience). 

On the other hand natural tile looks lush.

* Our kitchen floor isn’t bad, but I took quite a long time over it. Our last house, the builders got a pro-tiler in to do it, and it was more uneven than this one.

Whether stone or ceramic/porcelain is cheaper here or not varies, actually. I’ve no idea why. The human-made stuff is usually cheaper (or starts cheaper), but when my folks’ bought their tile the real slate they wanted was cheaper at the time than the other stuff.

It’s irrelevant to me, because I want porcelain. Kitchens and bathrooms have nothing on the staining potential of an oil painting studio, and porcelain is far less porous than the other options.

I wonder about the tile size discrepancies… there are variability issues, of course, but I know lots of people who’ve used cheap-as-can-get tile from both the two big box stores, and never had a problem. Could be another regional difference.

All that said, I can’t find the tile I actually WANT.

Ah, that’s good to know, because when we do have somewhere to tile, we’ll probably want natural in the kitchen-type and bathroom type areas, an then ceramic in Kathryn’s studio.

I think size issues are less of a problem on the floor – on the wall ‘cos you’re leaving the tile spacers in it becomes rapidly apparent when they aren’t all the same size and it’s quite hard to subtly correct for it. On the floor, you can just tweak the spacing to adjust a little as you go.  

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

pyoorkate:

shadesofmauve:

I think I may finally have a plan for my yarden path, and maybe for some bed borders. The problem with garden boarders is I don’t really like them, and I don’t want to spend a ton of time making a nice division between lawn and garden when I don’t really want the lawn at all – but I haven’t…

Sounds like a neat plan… I like that you’re also engaged in solving problems way ahead of when you might conceivably get to do anything about them.

Of course, my first instinct is to say ‘PALLETS’ as a solution. I have no idea how, but that’s currently my solution to all gardening problems.

Slightly more sensibly, I am opposed to paying for edging of borders, thus we use reclaimed bricks (by which I mean, we wait until they come up on Freecycle, fill the car until it can take no more, then edge with that). I was going to suggest dead roof-tiles, but then I remembered that ceramic roof tiles aren’t really a thing in the same way in the US that they are here. A quick tour of most of Bristol will reveal some victorian house having its tiles ripped off and binned for modern replacements (as they delaminate) – and those delaminated tiles also make quite nice edging (and moss grows on them, rapidly, making them settle into the landscaping).

Unhelpful, I realise, but I’m post-nights and thus oversharing :)

pyoorkate: I am a huge fan of pallets! Vertical pallet gardening is a personal favorite of mine and if shadesofmauve is interested in a vertical set up when she’s ready, I can always  gift my time and show her how! It’s a fun and easy project.

Aye, one of the first things we did with pallets was the vertical garden. It doesn’t exactly work right, because we didn’t put a mesh in first, so the soil washes out, slowly. But the sorrel’s so happy in there that we don’t want to move it either :)

Next time we’ll do it right :)