Well, Half of the Tile is Here

I apologize for my blogging absence. I have been hit with some strange illness that seems to be going around that's causing a horrible sore throat and just absolute exhaustion so the last two days I have been sleeping and doing little else. Bleh, I hate being sick.

I just wanted to pop in and share half of our tile order though. The tile place totally spaced and ordered us the wrong tile for the ground in front of the fireplace, so we'll have to wait another week or so till we get it. Boo hoo :( But, the tile on the fireplace surround is the same kind, just a different pattern, so you'll get the idea.

But before I get to those pics, I'll show you just a bit of fireplace progress.

We knew we'd have to paint on weld-crete to the existing stone and brick to help the new mud job properly attach to the old existing fireplace, and as I was getting ready to slather it on, some of the stone that was leftover from the demo I did was still chipping away and falling off. I decided to get out a chisel and hammer and bust more of it out to be safe and give us a really good tile job with no stone, mortar or old bricks giving way. The fireplace went from this

To this

With no more chunks falling off I cleaned things up with the vacuum and then a sponge and painted on the weld-crete


And Chris installed some metal lathe to help give the mud job strength and then started the mud job (we still have just a little bit to finish up on the left side)


Okay, NOW it's time to show you the tile :)

You may not find it quite as exciting as me, but OMG I'm in love.

Earlier I was thinking about white marble but Chris didn't like the idea because we've got carrera in the front bathroom and that's what we'll put in the back bathroom as well. So we headed out to a local tile showroom a week or two back and browsed around not really sure if we'd be buying anything that day, but I was eager to get my greedy little hands on some pretty tile :)

Immediately both of us were really drawn to the grayish, blue stone

And we thought it would fit in nicely with the room because the gray walls have just the faintest hint of blue to them and I really need to get away from my need of white tile :) It was love at first sight for us :)

The only bad thing? A pretty hefty price tag. At least for cheap-o's like us. The tile clocked in at $16 and $17 per sq. ft. We coughed a little and bit the bullet. We reasoned that we weren't getting too much and really, I don't think we've ever paid more than $12 sq. ft. for any of the tile in our house, so this ONE splurge was okay (and none of the tile for our bathrooms has been over $10 sq. ft.). But it was tough to choke down a nearly $400 price tag for just fireplace tile. Yikes

Now, this 2x8 tile will go on the fireplace surround and run vertically (you can see the hints of blue in the two outside pieces)

When we install it we'll stagger the pattern so all the seams won't line up, but that's obviously a little hard to show when laying them against the metal lathe.

The tile that will go on the ground in front of the fireplace is the same tile in the same size but in a herringbone pattern. Unfortunately the tile place ordered the wrong stone, so when it got there and was white, well, Chris didn't get to take home all the tile. Sigh... But it is exciting to get to have some of it in the house and see how it ties together with the two paint colors

I think it looks really great with the dark wood stain of the mantle too.

Well, I know I'm excited to see what the tile will look like installed, but we've got to get to sanding and restaining the floors before we get to tiling, but hopefully when our herringbone tile comes in that lights a fire under our butt to get to the floors because I don't think either of us are especially excited for it. Not that we don't want to do it, but for some reason we're both just sort of apathetic.

Now, until new tile comes and our floors are refinished, I think I need to take another nap. This mystery illness is killing me