Remodeling

[kareid]

frolain and I are trying to remodel the downstairs bathroom and replace the floor in the downstairs kitchen.  If any of you remember it, the downstairs bathroom is the one with the square pink standing shower stall that doesn't fit the space, so that water hits the floor when it's running without a carefully rigged shower curtain, the rough 2x4s that were used as a frame for the door, the stained floor, and other general not-right.  The downstairs kitchen floor is pink and "white" linoleum from a decade I'm not sure of.  We thought it was black and white when we first bought the house until two moppings with bleach water revealed it was pink and white (matching the then-pink walls.)

We've had a contractor in to give us a quote on labor for replacing the kitchen floor with tile and doing the bathroom work, and have another one scheduled.  We also went to start looking at tile.  This is where the real problem comes in.  The tile places we've seen so far seem to want to exclusively sell natural-ish colors, things I sort of think of as mediterranean tones, in large, 12" tiles for floor tile.  They'll branch out a bit into 12" marble for baths.  Or into tiny hexagonal tile if you're going for the antique style (we're not.)  12" marble would look ridiculous in this closet-sized bathroom.  We'll probably manage to find something reasonable in this color palate for the kitchen, but I think we're going to have to compromise a lot more than I'd hoped for the bathroom.  This is really frustrating me, as I feel like we can't be the only people who don't want to do our bathroom in marble or antique tile.

On a different note, I called my dad last night, to find that he and my sister were feeding a baby goat in the house.  They'd brought it in because they were worried about it making it through its first few days in the cold.  Apparently one of the goats had triplets but lost them due to the cold in the barn.  My sister describes baby goats as being a lot like puppies.

Comments

[lakmiseiru.livejournal.com]

My mom did our upstairs bathroom in antique-ish tile - it was about 3" squarish octagons with tiny diamonds in between them. A pain to lay, but they don't look like the absurd tiny hexagons or the giant tiles; my mom ended up doing the laying herself, for cheap, and got a hiring offer from the contractor as a result...

Here's about what they looked like in size/color:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/50/118497785_6fcd7ce06b.jpg

Might not be what you want either, but it's another option.

I must ask your sister for goat stories! *squee*

[kareid.livejournal.com]

That is, in fact, the exact tile we're most considering right now, though maybe in green diamonds. I'm not convinced I love it, because it is still fairly antique style, but it is less so than most of that style. We're not sure what to do with the shower if we use that, since using a different size of white tile in the shower next to this would be strange.

[conana.livejournal.com]

I don't know anything about dedicated tile shops around here. The one time I remodeled a bathroom, we tried a few tile shops (full of very expensive 2" glass tiles), but ended up getting 4" (or maybe 3") tile from Home Depot. Ours were fake sandstone, but there was plenty of solid color available.

[kareid.livejournal.com]

Home Depot currently has many choices of solid wall tile, but no choices of solid colors in floor tiles. Wall tiles are not supposed to be sturdy enough to be used on floors, though floor tiles can be used on walls. I've vaguely heard that you can use some wall tile on floors in non-commercial (ie, low traffic) buildings, but that's not something I'd trust the Home Depot people to give me advice on.

[avacon.livejournal.com]

We had good luck looking at a number of the tile stores over in Watertown.
There are plenty of good 4-6" floor tiles, although I don't remember
whether or not there were many non-earth tone colors.