The Joys of Tile Shopping

Picking tiles for our bathroom renovation was like getting my teeth pulled...painful. We are tiling our shower (walls and floor) and half tiling the rest of the bathroom. So as the head (and only) designer, I had a huge task of finding the tiles that fit our budget and style. My aim for the bathroom design is one that is contemporary, but not too modern as to turn off potential buyers when we decide to move. This meant no drool worthy glass tiles, since they are expensive and are hot now, but what about later?

We crossed off going to tile stores after we checked out a good number, most of which were without price tags on display. I soon found out that I have expensive taste. Off to Lowe's and Home Depot, where I fell in love with a beautiful mosaic with hints of metallic design that went well with green, gray, cream or brown, and thought it was flexible enough to work with other tiles. I immediately thought it was the perfect accent tile. The problem was, it looked better with darker tiles as it made the mosaic pop out more, and my husband was of course gravitating towards those. Unfortunately, darker tiles can make the bathroom look smaller.


We put the mosaic against lighter colors and it didn't pack a punch like it did with the darker tiles.


Then, it came to the issue of whether the tiles come with different sizes (we needed smaller ones for the shower floor) and bullnoses. This changed our game plan quite a bit. Our contractor still hasn't finished our bathroom after 2 weeks of work, but I'll definitely share with you the final product when the time comes.