Sunday, April 27, 2008

The tiling marathon has been completed!



Faced with the fear of Roscoe's parents arriving and our spare bedroom still being a building site, we finally knuckled down to the tiling/plastering. Three backbreaking days of tiling later, and I never have to lay another herringbone terracotta tile. This was the last room in the house to be tiled (I think there's a step somewhere that still needs done, but I'm trying not to think about it). They still need grouting in the gaps between the tiles, but they look quite nice anyhow.
This bedroom has a door onto the street and, to limit the dust in the house, I set up my workbench and tilecutter outside. By the third day, I was the attraction of the village, with several neighbours dropping by to judge my progress. They seemed bemused to see a girl tiling: "You're doing it? By yourself?". I think my reputation just got upped a level to "very eccentric foreigner". Nonetheless, the compliments and encouragement did keep me going through the long last day of tiling.
Now I must apply myself to transforming the antique bed into a comfy night's sleep. I'm certainly learning new skills!

Monday, April 21, 2008

Advice needed - mosaic centrepiece in bedroom floor


Okay, so we're still going. We took a break after - disappointingly - not finishing for our Easter deadline. This was mainly due to work commitments for Roscoe, and house fatigue on my part!
But now I'm ready to press on for a few last weeks of hard labour before our first guests arrive. The main job is still plastering and tiling the remainder of the bottom bedroom, and of course the dreaded painting. The plastering is most of the way to done, thanks to some weekend work by Roscoe, and I'm preparing to lay into the tiling.
BUT, it's a very weird shaped room. I plan to do, as elsewhere, a border of the terracotta tiles, and the rest in herringbone layout. I also want to add a centrepiece of 30cm x 30cm mosaic (which I bought a while back). But where should a centrepiece go?
The obvious answer is "the centre", but in this room, I'm really not so sure, as it's got two zones. The physical centre doesn't feel very, er, central.
Design guides suggest lining a decorative piece up with the centre of a door. Great, that makes sense. But this room has two doors on opposite walls, and they aren't lined up. On the plan above I've drawn a central axis, and then an axis from the centre of one door to the other. Is this where the mosaic should go? Should it be straight to the long axis, or to the one between the doors?
About the room: it's very rustic (a euphemism for having no straight walls) and will be a twin bedroom for guests. It's about 5m x 2.5m (measurements in the drawing above). One of the doors comes from the hallway, and the other leads, via a metre-deep arch, to an external door. I don't expect the external door to be used often.
The photo shows the mosaic surrounded by some of the main tiles. Do let me know your opinions and past experience.