When we were remodeling our house
we had occasion to do a fair amount of tile work
and one of the projects was a front gate.
Years before I had bought a whole pallet of Indiana limestone
in 3/4" and 2" thick x 2' square pieces at the local stone yard
that was left over from a large order.
They wanted to get rid of it
and gave me a great price to take it all away.
The last bits of it I used on top of the stone pilasters
as part of the gate project.
To see how I did this go to the post:
In the living room we wanted to cover the radiator
so we made a counter out of the same Indiana limestone,
and if you look carefully to the lower right of the above photo
you will notice the same limestone in the doorway threshold with a walnut nosing.
The walnut protects the edge of the rather soft limestone.
In the same room above I used walnut for the edge between wood and tile.
The tile is a 16"x16" from Santa Fe Discount Tile and Carpet.
Chuck, the owner, was a wealth of information about tile
and turned me on to the large size tile.
At the time all his discount tile was one dollar a square foot
and if one was able to check often enough you could find
really nice porcelain or Italian tile in limited quantities,
which were end runs or discontinued tiles
and of course he would also special order anything we wanted
from his showroom displays.
This nice 18'' porcelain is over the kitchen sink looking into the sun room,
and the insets are pieces of fine Chinese porcelain.
Years ago a friends of ours son accidentally broke part of a collection
and we were more than happy to save them from the trash and use the pieces in mosaics.
I found with my wet saw I needed a specific diamond blade made for porcelain only.
In the bathroom the field is 12"x12" tiles and the border is a baseboard quarry tile
(free from Chuck who wanted them out of the way )
which I cut the triangles out of to make the trim.
The window sill is cast in place concrete,
and the wall is adobe which is why it is so wide.
The big problem with the large tile size is that the surface you are tiling on
must be in a flat plane which can sometimes be difficult with adobe walls.
The trim near the top in this shower is made from narrow cut offs
allowing me to use up some of the scraps.
The floor and trim "dots" were leftover from the kitchen floor
13"x13" tiles which I cut into 2"x 2" pieces to more easily conform
to the slope in the floor (I like a lot of slope in the shower floor).
Believe it or not this is a 3'x3' shower, the minimum size in my book.
(Please Note: this is a rewrite of the post
Stone And Ceramic Tile 831 from 2/26/10.)
(Please Note: this is a rewrite of the post
Stone And Ceramic Tile 831 from 2/26/10.)
