Long and Short of It

When Josh and I were out in California for Christmas, we visited Fireclay Tile in San Jose and found ourselves in tile heaven. We were impressed with the variety of tile and excited to learn that much of it was 'green' (made from recycled materials). We could have tiled our whole house with what we saw there, but since they weren't exactly local, we settled on selecting the decorative tile for our main-level bathroom and for the risers on our stairs. Yep, we're planning to do something like this (or this) on the stairs going up from the dining room to the 2nd floor. It's going to be way cool!

Anyway, since this tile is not available through Architectural Ceramics -- where we are getting the rest of our tile -- our builders will have to order it directly from the manufacturer. I've spent the past few days finalizing the details of all the sizes, shapes, and colors with them so they can place the order. Today I went over to the house to go over the tile design for the bathroom with Rob so he can estimate the quantities we'll need. I had some PDFs of the bathroom layout so I drew a quick sketch of what I had in mind, but it was very helpful to be able to stand in the actual bathroom with a tape measure to get a better sense of what goes where.

We want to have a tiled-in mirror in this bathroom, so Rob and I tried to determine what the dimensions of the mirror should be based on the tile layout, the height/width of the vanity, and the placement of the light fixtures. Rob marked everything out on the wood studs so we could get a better sense of where the mirror would go. It probably doesn't show up well in this photo, but we ended up with lots of pencil marks just to the left of the green pipe.It ended up being a rather comical -- but extremely helpful -- exercise because I am 5'2" and Rob is 6'5". (See my post entitled "Ann's Photos" for a visual reference.) We tried to come up with a solution where I'd be able to see more than just the top of my head while Rob would still be able to see his. (Not that we expect Rob to be primping in our mirror after the house is done, but this is supposed to be a 'universal design' bathroom, so we'd like it to be accessible to the 'vertically challenged' as well as the freakishly tall...)

On my way out, I noticed the concrete guys had taken the forms off the window well. Because we are renovating the house, the county required us to add some sort of egress from the basement so it would comply with current building codes. The original house did not have any access to the outside from the basement -- the only way out was up the stairs and through the kitchen. So, even though we weren't thrilled to have to spend extra money on an egress window, I'm sure it will be worth it both as a safety issue and for the extra natural light it will let into what was a very dark basement.Speaking of the basement, I walked down our new basement stairs for the first time and took a quick look at what's been happening down there. The crew has been converting our previously inaccessible crawl spaces into accessible storage areas with concrete floors. Yay! You can never have too much storage space. Sorry I didn't get any photos, but there wasn't much to see (or much light to see it by since they haven't created the new window opening yet).