Thursday, November 20, 2008

salvaged.

On the remodel front, today is the first day I can honestly say I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Last week I was ready to kill someone, and it was coming down to a tie between our cabinet guy and our tile guy. But then I went to Sonoma for a couple of days and drank a LOT of very nice wine, and hung out with some even nicer people, and I feel better. Our junket included a private tasting at the wonderful Merry Edwards, which I've been dying to visit for years. And I found a used book store I hadn't seen before, and picked up a handful of really neat books about California history, including a first edition of After Earthquake and Fire - firsthand stories of the San Francisco 1906 quake, published in, well, 1906.

We've got tile in the kitchen and bath, and decided we wanted to tile the wall behind the gas stove that will be in a little alcove in the master bedroom. (There's no central heat, and before the remodel the entire house was heated with a similar stove in the dining room. I spend most of my office hours in a hat and mittens.)

I drooled over some very expensive hand-rolled Craftsman style tiles for this space, but we're so over-budget we can't really justify additional purchases that aren't necessary to live in the house. You know, like doors and windows. So we went to the local salvage yard, which is chock full of tiles in every shape/size/color imaginable.

We mapped out the size of our wall on the ground and gathered up all the tiles we could find to match the colors we're using in the house. We started at the top:

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and noodled around with different patterns. It took us a few false starts to get a feel for it, but we're pretty happy with the end result:

You can see where a few of the tiles will have to be cut, but for the most part it all works as is. There were two tiles with lemons on them, so of course I had to use them, and a toilet paper holder thingie there at the bottom, and several tiles with little penciled numbers in their centers. There's one beautiful handmade tile in the upper right that the salvage yard owner had been keeping inside for herself, but when she saw what we were doing she insisted that we use it.

The wall won't look as elegant or cohesive, maybe, as it would have with the expensive tile, but I still think it will be lovely to wake up to every day.