Glad I Checked

I just got back from a week-long conference on the west coast, ready to dive right in and get the wall tile up. My wall tiles are "strips" of marble that come in 12" x 12' squares glued onto a mesh. This makes the installation significantly faster and easier. In this picture you can see one square with the mesh side up, laying on top of another square with the tile side up. These pieces are not tumbled marble, but they aren't polished either, so they have a very natural "stone" appearance. I bought them for $11.00 per square from a discount tile website called Natural Stone Outlet. This is a great price. I saw something very similar, if not the same, at The Great Indoors in Denver for about $30.00 each. Click here to see these tiles in a sample installation. I love these tiles. I ordered samples of the grey ones, too, but these black ones are so cool, it was an easy choice.

The edges of the tile blocks fit together so that the "seams" will disappear after they are grouted. Here are two tiles laying side-by-side on my kitchen countertop. At this point, the seam is obvious because the mesh does not extend out to the edges so you can see the countertop more clearly along the joint. My plan is to position the edge of the tile line about 4 inches out from the edge of the wall. This will leave alternating "gaps" of about 2" and 4". I will post some pictures to illustrate this when I start intalling them, so check back if that last bit was confusing.

I know that filling in those edge areas will take almost as long as laying all the rest of the whole squares, so having pieces of the right sizes ready to go will speed up the process. And when you are working with wet mortar, saving time is meaningful. I don't want to cut them if I don't have to, which is why I need to place the full squares far enough from the edge of the wall so that the gaps will be the same sizes as these pieces. So I have been cutting up some of the sheets of tiles and sorting them by size into several boxes.

Whenever you are laying tile, it is a good idea to take them from various boxes as you go, so that you don't end up with a region that is a different color than the rest. So I decided I should do the same thing for these little pieces. I have 5 boxes of tile, so I started working my way along through each of the boxes. And it turned out to be a good thing I did this for another reason: when I opened up the 4th box , it turned out to be a box of GRAY ones! This is a big pain right now, but it would have been a lot worse if I had been in the middle of putting these things up on the wall! Better to find out now while it is just an inconvenience to have to get a replacement box.

So now I get to find out how easy these guys are to work with on a return when it is their fault. They have a fairly strict policy with a stiff restocking fee for "normal" returns, which I can understand. They don't want to have people sending back remnants that don't match the color lots they still have in stock, and the boxes are damned heavy, too, by the way. Handling orders is a big deal and this policy helps them keep a decent profit margin on very discounted prices. But this is an error on the part of their shipping crew, so they should be willing to replace it at no cost and with a minimum of hassle. I will let you know how this turns out. I have a lot more tiling to do in this house, so I hope they will be cool about it.