Tile, Bathroom, & Some Interesting Finds

On Sunday we decided to bite the bullet and spend $100 to fill up the truck and drive to Olympia Tile in Toronto to peruse their tile collection and perhaps pick out something for the floor of the bathroom and something for the walls of the shower stall we're putting in. We'd initially thought about looking at some honed marble, probably a carrera or something along those lines. We found this brilliant marble that although didn't come in the size tile we wanted, which would have been 6"x6", and only came in the 12"x12" tile it was gorgeous! The label on the plaque said it was a colour called "Dolomite White," which I suppose one could describe as a soft white with a little bit of a creamy tinge to it. I had an idea that marble would be a bit on the expensive side but I had no idea they would be as expensive as the tiles turned out to be. We'd be looking to spend around $3000 for the entire bathroom floor and that doesn't even take into account the pencil tile border or the tile for the shower stall. Basically instead of doing the tile we had originally intended, marble laid in a brick pattern on the floor with a light blue glass pencil tile border around the outside, we had decided to change it up and use white matte ceramic tile (6x6) with black marble tiles at the corners.

Aside from that we started pulling out the floor and walls in the bathroom. We've found that perhaps the house really isn't double brick as we originally thought and that it might actually be single brick with some sort of wattle substance between the studs and on the inside of the studs there is probably 2 layers of barn board type wood. The fact that the house might not be double brick does make doing the front window a bit cheaper, but it also means we have to now stud in the walls in the bathroom in order to insulate the bathroom and put up vapor barrier. We'd consider strapping out the living room and having it spray-foam insulated instead to ensure we don't lose any floor space. Going to spray foam under the house too.

To keep you all here, a view of the bathroom straight to the toilet. You can see we took away some of the "plaster" which turned out not to really be plaster, its actually drywall that has been fully plastered rather than having the seams plastered and sanded. This was probably done in the 1950s when the floor was done.

And our finds for the week. We found these under the bathroom floor around the sink. Mum reckons that they were probably used to level off the floor a bit before installing the linoleum (green in colour). They're from 1952 and 1953 and there are some pretty awesome full colour ads.