The bathroom seems to be coming together. At least we have a floor, walls, and a ceiling now. We’ve got a line on a vanity that we like – and we appear to have a solution to the issue of tile.
I remain astonished by how each and every part of this process ranges from “that’s optional,” up to tens of thousands of dollars – and still you’re doing it wrong. I think that the most frustrating and stressful aspect of this whole process is making snap decisions on expensive items without a feel for how they affect the process downstream. A close second is that the last things that you pick are the pieces you’ll touch every day. So here at the end, when I’m feeling most like the project is out of control budget-wise, I’m tempted to chintz out on the handles I’ll touch in the shower … the mirror I’ll look at every morning … and so on.
Tile is sort of amazing.
We went to this one place and fell in love with a bunch of different pieces. All of them were at least two weeks away … with the custom mosaic including little marble birds being a full 10 weeks out. That also cost more than some small used cars. The tile in that place cost at least $8 per square foot, and went north from there.
After that we went across the street to Home Depot and verified that you really can get basic space-filling tile in standard sizes for closer to $2 per square foot. Cheaper if you look around. We’ll probably wind up filling the majority of the square footage at around that rate.
This afternoon we went to another tile place who proudly said that 90% of their showroom was available for delivery within 1 week. Score. Fell in love all over again, but this time for substantially less money and closer to our schedule. Found a couple of snappy accent tiles, and a really nice dark blue glass for trim.
Once again, it feels entirely possible that we’ll make our goal of having a functional shower by the second week of October. Who knows?
