After a few months of thinking, rethinking and overthinking the future bathroom remodel, I started looking at hard numbers and narrowing down options.
I’m hoping that I can keep the cost of the new and improved bathroom under $5,000. That might be wildly optimistic, but hey, everyone needs goals.
Luckily, the water-saving toilet is covered. And the tub is staying. I have an estimate for the plumbing work in hand. But I need to settle on the design plan and make it conform to the budget. And part of that involves talking myself out of the tile I want and talking myself into tile I can afford. That particular process isn’t going well.
The tile I really, really want is the Little Diamonds Mix in Tropics Blue by Heath Ceramics in conjunction with Dwell Patterns. (Did you get all of that?)
Unfortunately, that particular pattern costs $24 a square foot. Eek. Even though the bathroom isn’t very big, getting enough to cover the 45 square feet and allowing for a 10% overage would ring in at $1,200. Um, no. I’m crazy, but not that crazy.
The look of small tiles would work well in the space, so I turned to penny rounds next. Luckily, those fall in the $5- to $7-a-square-foot price range. And they’re not bad. They’re just not the tile I’m trying not to buy. The colors I’m considering are (clockwise from top left): aqua, cobalt, gray and sky blue.
Hexagonal tiles — in sky blue, left, or varying shades of powder blue — could work. Maybe.
Then there’s also the possibility of triangles reminiscent of the Dwell tile, but at about $16 a square foot, it’s not really a bargain.
The search continues. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some money in the street. Like, say, $1,200. That was dropped by Bill Gates, who will never even notice it’s gone.
Updated to add: OK, yes, I know Bill Gates spends a lot of his money on eliminating malaria and weird worms in Africa and that’s admirable. But if I find cash lying in the street, then I’m going to think one of two things.
- Drug cartels left the money for a pickup and will cut off one of my hands if I take it. (And maybe that’s a conclusion not everyone would draw, but I grew up on the border, and in my experience, unexplainable things can often be laid at the feet of the narco traffickers.) That’s where some risk assessment comes in.
- Fate/God/magical unicorns really want me to have the money to buy tile.
