Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Bathroom Remodel Part 3: Material Selection and Tiling

Part 1: Demolition
Part 2: Plumbing

We're still putzing along with our little bathroom renovation, moving at the speed of almost-frozen molasses. For this post, I'm going to take you back in time (November) to where we installed the tile flooring, which has surprisingly been the easiest part of this whole adventure thus far (but certainly not without it's own set of issues).

At this point I had been in the interior design field long enough to know that I should have ALL my finishes and paint colors selected before starting on anything. I went to a local tile showroom and grabbed way too many samples (tile samples are heavy, ya'll!).

I had also designed a cast concrete vanity and shower niche, so I made some concrete samples with increasing amounts of white portland cement to figure out the color we wanted.

Ratios of concrete to portland cement from left to right: 1:0, 3:1, 1:1, 1:3

Basically what you want to do when you've got all these samples is lay them all out along with your other bathroom elements. You can see we've got a sink, a brushed nickel pipe, concrete, and a brown wood tile as our teak-wood stand-in. It may be overwhelming to see it all at once, but here's the trick: rather than trying to decide what you like best, start by eliminating the things that aren't working for you. Hopefully this gets you to a manageable place where you can start making decisions. Of course even with this method, we still debated the choices off-and-on for an hour or more.