Friday, August 16, 2013

Floor Tile for the Bathrooms

I have two bathrooms, affectionately referred to as the Blue Room and the Green Room.  The Blue Room has white fixtures and 4x4 blue tile on the shower enclosure while the Green Room has Ming green fixtures with speckled yellow/gold 4x6 tile in the shower. Sadly, at some point the floors in both bathrooms were redone with a sort of faux travertine vinyl tile.  I have no idea what was in the bathrooms originally. The current floors don't look terrible but they don't have the retro look I'm going for.  They also aren't impervious to water because they were never sealed.  Finally, I don't care for the look - the rest of the bathrooms are original so the new floors look out of place.

Here's what the bathrooms looked like when I bought the house:




Since I bought the house 4 years ago, I've been searching for the right tile to put in each bathroom.  The blue room was easy.  The fixtures are white and the tile is an easy-to-match sky blue.  I long ago settled on Merola Tile's Academy mosaic tile in blue.  Here it is against the shower tile:


The right floor tile for the Green Room has proven to be far harder to find. There are a lot of colors going on in there - green fixtures, cream/yellow/gold tile, and a wood sink cabinet.  The tile is especially hard.  To me, it registers as yellow but when I tried to find paint for the bathroom, I discovered that it's not yellow at all - it's orange.  The other troublesome part about the Green Room is that the colored fixtures are almost impossible to match in either paint or tile - trust me I've tried.  Ming green is on the green end of the scale but there's enough blue in it to make it tough to match to either color.  So I've been very demoralized in trying to find a floor tile that would match  - or at least not clash with - the Green Room.  A friend suggested trying something that was neither yellow or green, so I tried pink.  To my surprise, pink actually looked quite good in the room.  BUT - I don't want a pink bathroom.  I want a green and yellow bathroom.

So to my complete shock, after four years of searching, I finally found a floor tile that will match the tile in the Green Room.  I ordered a sample of every Lyric hexagonal mosaic tile from Mosaic Tile Supply - and I'm glad I did.  The colors on MTS's website in no way look like they do in real life.  When I ordered mosaic tile LGH-208 I thought I would be getting something peachy orange but low and behold it's yellow and gold!  AND it matches the tile in the Green Room PERFECTLY.

Behold the awesomeness:



Mosaic Tile Supply has an amazing array of tile patterns that would work well in any MCM house.  They also have tiles that would work for older homes and new homes as well. http://www.mosaictilesupplies.com/