From the start, I was dead set on using engineered stone for our counter tops. While not a pretty as natural stone, it is about as bullet proof a material as you can get. But, slowly but surely, our designer talked me out of engineered stone in favor of natural stone. It’s true, it doesRead more about Caring for nice things[…]
The tile guys have been working on the back porch stone for a few weeks now, interrupted by the fact that we fell short of one size of stone and had to order more. Here is the sub-slab. Partial progress. Today, they’ve finished the stone laying and are grinding the joints to make them even.Read more about Exterior stone[…]
Now that the stain is done, and the painters masking has been removed, we can see the living room fireplace complete.
We have a lot of exterior doors. Unfortunately, for 4 sets of French doors, we set the door thresholds right on the water proofing flashing underneath, not leaving much room for the aesthetic treatment above the flashing. At the time, our stone & tile contractor told us it wasn’t a problem, but that turned outRead more about Above the pain threshold[…]
One of the two basement showers is now done. We had to bring in a separate tile contractor to do these bathrooms as our original tile contractor isn’t providing enough manpower to get everythign done on time. It is a simple subway tile bathroom with a patterned floor. The second one should be done thisRead more about Basement shower[…]
The back of our house on the first floor is the kitchen and family room. The family room has a large 6-panel sliding door that opens most of the room to the back patio. In the kitchen, we had a vision of having a pass-through counter and outdoor bar seating, to make it easy toRead more about Pass through counter[…]
We chose this beautiful blue stone for our outside patios and decks. We also wanted to carry the stone to the interior of the house in a few places – the sun porch (to make it feel almost like an outdoor space), the mud room (to be able to withstand the high traffic and inevitableRead more about Stone does not equal tile[…]
Well finally, is all I can say about the tile in this shower. The problem was that our tile & stone sub-contractor picked some stone for the perimeter, pony wall, and threshold, that didn’t match the stone used on the sinks for this Jack & Jill bathroom. We had a heck of a time gettingRead more about The most difficult shower[…]
As we’ve been finding out, almost all tile involves some sort if imperfection. It rarely works out that either horizontally or vertically you have enough space for full time on every side of a surface that gets tile. With respect to our living room fireplace, we faced three different places that we had to accommodateRead more about The imperfection of tile[…]
Our master bathroom is the first bathroom to have the tile complete. We’ve got others that are close to being done, but they stubbornly have this or that missing. We are pretty thrilled with how the master bathroom came out. It looks pretty elegant, without being over the top.