Welcome back to Week 2 of the One Room Challenge. Last week, I shared the before photos of my master bathroom and my graphic glam mood board for the space. This week it’s all about all about the tile – and I’m really curious to hear your opinions!
I don’t know if I was living under a rock, or what, but two months ago I didn’t know about cement tile. What I did know is that everywhere I turned I kept seeing photos of gorgeous, graphic tile patterns. I got it in my head that this was exactly the look I wanted for my master bathroom makeover, so I visited just about every tile store in Denver searching for something matching the images I had been seeing.
Swoon worthy images like these…
But as I searched Denver for similar graphic tile patterns, I came up empty at one store after another. Finally I did the smart thing, and started research online. I tracked down a handful of those photos I had been crushing on, dug a little deeper, and discovered that the tile for each and every one of those rooms came from the same place – the Cement Tile Shop. I made a beeline for their website, and it was like I had found the holy grail of gorgeous, graphic tile.
I immediately reached out to Cement Tile Shop to ask if they’d be interested in partnering with me as a sponsor of my One Room Challenge bathroom makeover, and I was thrilled to hear back from them with a yes!
That brings us to the hard part…picking just one tile pattern. But first, let me remind you where we plan to put the tile. And then I want to know which one you would choose!
See that giant mirror? I can’t wait to get rid of it! And those amber colored lights are going away as well – to be replaced by pendant lights that will hang from the ceiling. That will leave the wall above the counter empty… to be replaced with nearly 40 square feet of graphic cement tile!
I was immediately drawn to so many of the tile patterns, but I was having a hard time picturing what they would look like in our space. Fortunately, Cement Tile Shop has got that covered! The website has a visualizer tool that allows you to upload a photo of your room and overlay any one of their tile patterns in the appropriate location.
I uploaded the photo of our bathroom, and drew a rectangle the highlight the area where I want the tile to be.
In the next step, I input the dimensions of the space. My photo is a straight on view, but the program also allows you to adjust the angles if need be.
It just took those two simple steps to set up my photo in the visualizer tool, and then I could start testing out all of the different tile patterns – like this houndstooth {called Aberdeen Black} that caught my eye right from the start.
While this visualizer tool is super helpful, I had to keep reminding myself that I will have framed mirrors hanging in front of the tile, which will break up the pattern and cover a significant amount of square footage. As a result, I decided to take a screenshot of each tile option from the Cement Tile Shop visualizer, and then I opened up those screenshots in Photoshop and overlaid the mirrors that I have my eye on.
Here’s the Aberdeen Black again with the mirrors. You can see what a difference the mirrors make – they keep the pattern from feeling too overwhelming.
Here are the three other patterns I narrowed it down to…Circulos Black:
It was such a tough decision! I’m really curious to hear which you would have picked?
Do you want to know which tile we finally decided on?! I’m going to make you wait just another minute while I tell you a funny story from about the tile delivery…
The freight company called to schedule the delivery for Monday, and the delivery guy arrived right on schedule. As he was carrying in the {very} heavy boxes of cement tile, at one point he paused and looked right at me and said, “You have Halloween makeup.” The without pause, he turned and walked away to carry in more tile. I didn’t know how to respond to that seemingly random statement. My train of thought went something like this… Did I put make up on today? Yes. I think it looked ok, but I don’t think I’ve looked in the mirror lately. Did he just insult me? Why else would he say that? What does that MEAN?! But I think I just responded with a confused, “O….K.”
After he carried the last box of tile in, he returned with a box labeled Halloween Makeup. Oh…so he meant. I had Halloween makeup as part of my delivery. Wait, WHY was I am getting a box of Halloween makeup?! I opened it up and found the box of tile sealer – a much more logical thing for the tile company to have sent.
Ok, I’ve kept you in suspense long enough. The tile we chose is…drum roll please…Circulos Black!
I’m in Salt Lake City this weekend for Snap – a conference for creative bloggers – so the master bathroom work is on hold for a few days. But come Monday morning we’ll be right back at it, and hopefully I’ll have lots of progress to report by next week!
Now I’m headed over to Calling it Home to see the updates from all of the other guest participants! There are over 200 ambitious projects underway!
