Tile

[cjsmith]

I'd like to remove the Mary Kay Pink from my bathroom walls.

I'm learning a lot more than I ever wanted to know about how to choose the right kind of tile, how to hang tile, how to remove old tile, what to do if what was under your old tile is not in fact appropriate for putting tile upon, and just generally how much money and time could be sunk into a seemingly simple project like this.

I do NOT trust my house. The things we've discovered...! I half expect to pull that tile off and find oh, I don't know, bare wood underneath. Or electrical wires swinging loose through standing puddles of water. Or complete lack of studs in this section of the house, for all I know. That's the kind of suspicion a person acquires after being in this house for a while.

I have also discovered that tile is incredibly frigging expensive. It's a lot worse when you go over to Home Expo Center, A Home Depot Company, where a shower door costs (I kid you not) $2500, and that's for one that doesn't actually open wide enough for a human.

In a way, I'm almost glad my bathroom is Mary Kay Pink. If it were ANY other color, I'd be thinking "perhaps that's not so bad after all," and I might just stop and live with it, but every time I get tempted to do that, the words I actually have to put together are "perhaps Mary Kay Pink isn't so bad after all," and then I hear what I just thought, and that's the end of THAT little delusion.

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

That never occurred to me. For all I know, I could. People paint perfectly good wood and brick, after all...

They're high-gloss ceramic tile, so it might be difficult to find something that would stick. Enamel, maybe.

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

You might be able to sand them to break up the glossy surface.

It might end up being a bigger pain than just re-tiling, but it would probably be less expensive, and you could get creative (different colors for sections, stuff like that)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I saw a lovely floor where someone had tiled with natural stone in a sort-of-quilt-like geometric pattern, and then painted a completely different sort-of-quilt-like geometric pattern OVER it, on the diagonal, letting the original tile pattern show through in half the shapes and applying paint on the other half. It was wild and creative and really neat.