Things are really starting to move along quickly now. The radiator is back in place. If you want to see some before and after pictures of it, they are here.
The tile is also moving a long nicely.
We got a bit lucky with one aspect of the tile job. There are a couple of ways to deal with outside corners (of which we have a total of 4 in the room) with tile. The first is to miter the edges which is not a bad idea in theory but it relies on the miter coming to a sharp point at the corner to really look good. With tile, that is a challenge because it is hard to cut an edge cleanly that way and the result is a very sharp corner in the room. This leaves opportunity for both the tile corner and anyone who comes in contact with it to be damaged. The other way is to use tiles specifically designed for corners – with rounded edges on one or two side of them. This works well for flat tiles as you can see below.
These tiles aren’t grouted yet so don’t show as well as they could but you get the idea.
For profiled tile, like chair rail for instance, this is not so easy. I’m sure that some tile manufacturers provide versions that include rounded edges but not many, and those that do would need to produce left and right hand versions to cover both possibilities – with a flat tile you only need one as there is no up or down so they can be flipped to address either direction. The alternative is to produce a profiled corner piece that works independent of which way you are coming a the corner. You can see what I mean below.
Its a great solution but for the fact that the tile manufacturer appears to have discontinued this particular tile shape. This is where the luck comes in – turns out that the company we are using for our tile had exactly 4 pieces of old stock in the colour that we needed. If we had more than 4 corners to deal with, we would have been in trouble – luck was on our side I guess.
On the other hand, there was a bit of a mix up on the round edge version of the flat tiles and we are about 35 tiles short at the moment. Its not a huge issue as the supplier has them in stock and we should get the missing pieces in about 2 days. Given the other work that needs to be done, it shouldn’t hold things up badly at all. It will just be a bit before the niche can be completed and the upper part of the opposite wall in the shower alcove.
Today cabinets are going in, I expect the guys to show up in about 45 minutes or so to get started. In the meantime, here is a quick set of pictures where you can see some of the tile work as it progressed along.
The next set of pictures should be significantly different.
People interested in seeing the full renovation process as tracked in this blog should start here.
The next entry for the renovation can be found here.
