Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The wonderful world of home renovation

We are currently having our deck repaired and waterproofed, which unfortunately meant jack hammering up our rather beautiful tessellated tiles. I went back the place we bought them originally, and the price has increased somewhere between 2 and 3 fold in the last 6 years. That has pretty much put paid to the idea of replacing them. We already have around $5k (at the old price) of tessellated tiles to do the barbecue area should we ever find a tiler prepared to do it and have the money at the same time. You can see the barbecue area from the deck in question, so whatever tiles I use up there need to blend sensibly.

The tessellated tiles are a red terracotta, with a border and some feature patterns. I figured if I used large red terracotta tiles and a couple of pre-fab mosaics, it should look ok. Seems simple enough. But this is an area related to the building industry - nothing is ever simple. Almost no-one makes red terracotta tiles. You walk into any tile shop, and you can find 496 shades of beige and 279 shades of grey, but that's it. Even more baffling, I can buy red terracotta coping. So you can edge your pool area (or whatever) in red terracotta, but not actually tile it.

Incidentally, the pre-fab mosaics are a doddle, found some lovely ones at an auction place for just over $100 a piece and at 600x600mm I would probably only need 2.

Anybody harbouring between 20 and 25 square metres of 300x300mm (or even 600x600mm) red terracotta tiles? (She asked hopefully - despite the futility.)

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