The Tile Saga

Our house has both tile and carpet downstairs. I’m not a fan of carpet, but I really like tile. I also like hardwood, but I find it’s not as durable. To keep the humidity close to comfortable in this dry, desert climate, I run humidifiers and I have a lot of house plants. I’ve accidentally stained wood floors before with over-watering or unexpected condensation. So tile is the most practical choice for me.

We decided to remove the downstairs carpet and replace it with tile. We didn’t want the added expense of chipping out the existing tile, so we went in search of tile that complemented the existing tile. Luckily, John was able to find a spare tile in the garage we could take to the tile stores, to try and find a complementary style and color of tile.

Here’s our existing tile. It’s a bit orange, which is popular in this part of the country. It’s actually more orange than in this picture.

I thought the best pairing would be a light beige tone tile, like one of these:

Turns out John likes dark, dramatic tile, because he doesn’t want everything all white and washed-out looking.

 

Ummm…I was thinking something light and neutral…so we were at an impasse.

Here’s John, talking on the phone with a colleague while we were at Arizona Tile.

They made us wear hard hats because there were big sheets of granite and quartz counter top in the warehouse. You can see how orange our tile is compared to his green shirt!

We struck out that day, so the next day I went back to the tile stores to try to find something halfway between too dark and too light.

 

Here’s some medium tones. None of which really match that orange very well!

Most stores let you borrow samples to take home. I was up at the counter, checking out yet another set of samples when suddenly, one of the store employees said, “I know that tile!” And he gave me the name of our orange tile. He knew who carried it, and he quickly gave them a call. Sure enough, they still carried it! So off I went to visit the store that actually had our original tile!

John and I briefly debated whether we really want orange tile for the entire downstairs, but we couldn’t settle on a better idea. So orange it will be!

The new tiles won’t be a perfect match because it will be a different dye lot. The tile guys suggested we use some smaller tiles as a threshold between the old tile and a new tile. They also suggested we use a different size tile for all of the new tile, so it is not so obvious if the color is slightly different.