Tiles.

Tiles don't do anything, or add any functionality to the room, and cost a shit-ton of money.  Choosing tiles, just like choosing clothes, means choosing what I think is nice looking, and I could spend 17 lifetimes doing that, just to ultimately pick something that everybody else in the world thinks looks shit.  So I do the manly thing, and defer to a woman.

After a bit of research, Kayliegh had a few ideas, one of which was the subway style tiles.  These look perfectly acceptable I thought, glossy white with black or dark grout, would look good with my black stone stuff.

I had measured the room to the millimetre. It was surprisingly complicated for such a small room, with the ledge and windowsill and round the door, it took a lot longer than I expected.  It came out at 13.39 square metres.


Our tile shop of choice was Dunkley Tiles, primarily because Kaylieghs dad has a 20% discount trade card, and it's local.






Once we got into Dunkley's, had a bit of a wander, we found the subway tiles at £16.99 / sq.m. came in at around £230.  Pretty good value, if not an insignificant sum.

That would be too easy though.


While walking around the tile shop we noticed a shower cubicle with a wood effect tile planks with graffiti all over them.  It looked massively different, and appealing, almost making the walls into artwork.

The only nagging thing, was that with such a small narrow room, the graffiti effect would be over-bearing.  The room measures just 700mm wider, by 1930mm long, so it risked turning it into a wooden box with a bit or writing on it.

We kept looking, and found a similar effect tile, but lighter, less wooden, and without the graffiti. Urban Wood Vanilla Natural- It's a ceramic tile, 1cm thick, in a light white finish, with some cool blue and brown discolourations that made it more interesting that your usual wall tile.  Nice and big as well, so fewer of them to put up (at this point I'm dreading the thousands of 1cm tiles I'm due to take down pretty soon).  I'm sold.

I think these are meant as floor tiles, and we notice them with a gloss finish in the tile shop floor.  The gloss finish is a bit much, and the ones that caught our eye were the matte finish.  The shop assistant, whilst obviously knowledgeable and friendly, has a pretty transparent sales-orientated focus, and initially tries to push us the gloss finish version.

We sit down, and get out my meticulous diagrams and measurements, and declare our requirement of 13.39 square metres.  She takes my diagrams and gives me all sorts of funny looks, like they're indecipherable nonsense or something. After turning them round several times, she asks for confirmation that the obvious wall is in fact the wall and the floor the floor.  I confirm without a hint of sarcasm in my tone, and she proceeds to knock together her version of the measurements.  Completely disregarding the window, the sill, the ledge, and the soon-to-be box, our helpful assistant just takes away a door space, from 4 wall spaces, and says "Fourteen" in a commanding voice.  Well look at that, she's pretty much bang on.

"So 14 Sq.m. of the gloss tile", she says as she taps away at her calculator, "is about £909".  I almost fell off my chair. The woman must be fucking delusional.  "No, the MATTE" I said, and she tappy tap tapped away again as I look at Kayliegh with absolute shock at the extortion she was trying to pull, and the price came down to £489.  She said it was a "special" because it was end of stock, and nobody wants the matte, and we're lucky it's such a small amount we need, so it's half price.  We didn't play our trade card just yet, partly because we didn't have it with us, and partly to see if we could get another discount first. Pfft. That didn't bloody happen, we didn't even get the trade discount in the end.

Long story short, and a lot of ranting deleted, it wasn't a "special", it's always available, and it's always available at that price. We ordered it at the beginning of march, with a 3 week delivery estimate, and now being told they're manufacturing it next month, May.  Bloody jokers.  Still the choice has been made and monies paid.

Lesson of the day - Nice tiles are expensive folks.

Floor tiles - didn't originally think we'd need them, and we could continue using the current floor.  It turned out that we couldn't, so we got these big Valmalenco Nero floor tiles:

They should contrast nicely with the light wall tiles and compliment the black surfaces. and they're 900mm long and 450mm wide, which means I only need 6, which cost about £150, and just chop them all one side, and lay them straight up. Easy street.