I dream of ... bathrooms

These days, while I'm lying still waiting for the baby to fall asleep, all I can think about is colors and textures: walls and tile.

The most important decisions to make -- as in, they were on our contractor's schedule to be decided last Friday -- are the bathroom tile choices so that they can be ordered and ready when the crew is.

Let me introduce you to our current main level bathroom. A humble little thing, it has white tile around with black trim and black squares in the basketweave floor tile.



The original idea for the new identically sized bathroom in the new place was to keep the traditional black and white tile but do purple walls on the upper half and white wainscoting on the lower. The painted wood is a lot cheaper than more tile, and we loved the look when we saw it at a friend's house.

The color combo and look I was going for was something like this:
Or, in my crude late-night drawing, this:
.
But the more I thought about it, the black and white just wasn't going to fit with the rest of the earth-toned house. And honestly, I wanted some green in there, and not just in the towels. The jackpot plan would be to use Motawi field tile on the floor, but that is out of the budget at over $40/sq ft. Still, I thought maybe we could do some other kind of green tile and shower surround trim.

So here is my second late-night drawing:

At the tile place today, we realized the line down between the vanity and the shower would probably have to have tile all the way if we go with the wainscoting plan, hence the hasty coloring in with black pen.

Oh, and the window up above the shower? We lost the existing window by building the addition on the other side of it. Our architect suggested keeping a high-up transom type window to let natural light into the bathroom. It could be glass blocks or more likely something that would be decorative over the piano in the addition. Here is a photo of that piano-wall-to-be looking through into the gutted bathroom.



The window would be wider than the original and not very deep. That's a work in progress and not a for-sure yet.

We went to a tile place today and could really only come up with this Garden Spot color that could, unglazed, work for the floor...

...and glazed work for the tub surround trim. It was the only green that wasn't too blue or too taupe and that also had the small trim available.

But as I looked around, I just felt like I'd be disappointed at this tile's lack of depth and interest. Every time I passed slate, I just sighed in admiration, almost as much as I drool over super-expensive Motawi tiles and other fancy brands.

Doesn't this stone look so much more interesting than the plain tile below?


I was so motivated that when I got home, after the babysitter had miraculously left me with a sleeping girl and a happy boy, I hopped online to check out the Stone & Pewter tile we'd seen just moments before we had to leave our short visit to a different tile store a few weeks back, rushing to get back to the babysitter.

Since the pollen is still watering a kindergartener's eyes around here and we are bound for an indoor spring break, I decided we'd brave an afternoon field trip back to the fancier tile shop to see the Stone & Pewter again get some samples.

The lighting wasn't great for this shot, but here are China Sea Green, Oasis (my favorite, but no longer made!) and Moss Green.


I'm awaiting an email with prices, but this field tile slate is supposed to be $6-8/sq ft. for this field tile compared to $5.90 for the Garden Spot tile that just didn't sing to me. The saleswoman did warn that the installers would need to take care to even out the field tile, which comes in variable thicknesses, unlike the more expensive honed tile.

We still have to think some more about this, not to mention hash out just how dark I'm allowed to make the purple walls (I like the C2 color Scooter, but we'll have to see how that looks tomorrow on the paper I just painted to test it out).

Opinions and advice?