With another 10/10 from Mr. Inspector, we could go on and put tape and wallboard compound on the seams and screws.
The next step was to tile the floor.
I don’t know if you have noticed this but for the last several years, the Tuscan look has been big in the world of home décor. As in BIG. When we were looking at homes prior to buying this mess, project, money pit, consumer of life, destroyer of sanity, we saw a lot of Tuscan-inspired bathrooms and kitchens. A LOT. Now I’m making no judgments about this (well actually I am) but it did get a little bit BORING. If you like it then good for you, it’s your home and you can do what you like with it, and we did see some very nice manifestations of this style. But it was not for us.
When we started looking in Lowe’s and other purveyors of tile for ideas, the Tuscan look was still by far the most prevalent kind of tile available. And it was cheap which probably meant that either no one had any money to put in tile at the moment and the shops were trying to off-load it, or no one wanted that look anymore so the shops were trying to off-load it. Whichever it was, it didn’t fit the beach vibe we were after and it wasn’t non-slip.
The whole non-slip was a big issue with us. Kitchens and bathrooms are wet places. Wet, plus slippery tile can lead to the reading of golfing or five-year-old women’s magazines, and the handing over of co-pays as you wait to be seen by a doctor. Being in our 50’s and 60’s means such thoughts come to mind more often than they did in the past.
But finding non-slip tile seemed like an impossible job. We just about wore our fingers away running tile after tile in every shop we could hunt down. Then one day we spotted a tile in Lowe’s. Called Gea beige, it was a 20” x 20” porcelain tile, in a beige, sand, grey colour that mimicked the look of slate. And it was non-slip. We checked out a sample and took it home. We looked at it with the carpet we were considering, and in the different areas it would go.
We had previously decided to have just one tile design since, downstairs from the living room, the different areas of tile would all be seen and we felt this would pull the look together. Although we didn’t have to do this upstairs, and we did find a brown version, we decided to use the light version there too.
To us, it looked a little like the ground in places near the beach at Salt Creek in Dana Point where sand, dirt, and rock come together. What better look for beach house décor? It cost $5 a square foot and we would be using quite a lot of it (kitchen, dining area, both bathrooms, entry, and around the fireplace) so it wouldn’t be cheap. Not as in 89 cents for the striped tile cheap but that coup, helped pay for the extra the Gea Beige would cost (which was on sale so not as expensive as it could have been) and it was the only thing that came close to being non-slip and the kind of colour and look we wanted.
And here it is laid on the floor. It looked as good as we hoped and Mrs. R could finally get a picture of the house looking like something other than a perpetual construction site.
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