Work Day 24/Calendar Day 34 - Granted

Today was apparently "think on your feet day" of the kitchen renovation, as the tile layout the designer emailed this morning had a significant number of the glass tiles occuring right over where there are outlets in the wall, so we were only going to end up with like seven glass tile insets. If it was up to me (and in my budget) I'd be covering every flat surface in the kitchen with these suckers, so seven wasn't going to cut it. And pretty much every other decision that had been made about the tile design ended up needing tweaking in order to work, so it's a good thing I wasn't absolutely wedded to the original plan.

I got called to the kitchen every 45 minutes or so to make a decision about how many glass tiles to inset in each location, where to end the field tiles around the window, how to finish off the tiles near the door, or to officially approve the design change we needed to make in order to start the tiling without the designer drawing up a whole new plan for us. This was more fun at the beginning, when I felt well, than it was around lunchtime, when I suddenly came down with vertigo and I felt like I had "a-fever-and-I'm-going-to-throw-up-soon." I'm sure the tile guys wondered why I was constantly carrying a plastic trashcan around with me, but I know when it's best to take precautions, and today was that day.

The positive side of all this on-the-spot decision making is that I got a chance to watch the tile guys work, which I was hoping for anyway, since applying tile is one of the few amateur home improvement projects I haven't tried yet. I got a kick out of the fact that the tile guys, while being very professional and obviously very good at what they do, cut some of the same corners I would feel guilty about cutting if I did the job myself. Need spacers you can adjust for size? Fold up cardboard strips you've ripped off of a cardboard box. Need to hold some tile in place temporarily? Electrical tape. I totally want to start working for them - I think I'd fit right in.

After a solid morning of work, most of the field tiles are in, and the glass tiles are being prepped over the weekend so they can be added on Monday. Here's where we are:

That one glass inset is just sitting there, it's not actually attached. This will all look much lighter once the under-cabinet lights are working - it photographs a little dark, too, so in real life you can actually tell that the insets are a 2"x2" grid of the teal glass tiles.

The counter on either side of the refrigerator is only 12" wide on one side and 15" wide on the other, and consequently the pattern we established on the main runs of backsplash would look a little dorky if we continued it over there. So we've been playing around with variations of the design (tiles as squares instead of on point, no glass insets, etc.) and complete departures from the design (just make a band a few inches tall so there's something there, but it's obvious we weren't trying to duplicate the pattern). The tile guy suggested this, which I like and Jason is sort of "ehhhh" about:

(note use of painter's tape? I love these guys!)

This weekend I'm going to be sitting down with the elevation for this wall and to see if I can come up with anything that both of us agree on. We've got almost 60 1" glass tiles left over to play with, and a whole box of the field tiles we can use, so the sky's the limit when it comes to designs.

And if it turns out that we have all of those glass tiles left over, I guess I can just sleep with them under my pillow at night or something. Sigh ...