Tile Extravaganza!

Right after we got back from Utah, Andy went to work so we could get everything tiled before he went back to school. He found some slate tile on Craigslist for a really good deal, so we went to check it out and get a sample piece. We picked up the samples at a temp agency, which was kind of weird, but we weren't going to turn down a good deal because of that! It was awesome and we let them know we wanted to by some. We figured we'd try out our bathroom first to see how it went because the tiles were reclaimed roofing tiles taken down from an old building in the city, so we had to cut the nail holes that held the tiles onto the roof off of every piece. We googled the address of where the tiles were being stored and went into an area of downtown Phoenix to get it. We thought we had the wrong address because the building our map sent us to was a deserted warehouse with barbed wire fences around it and broken windows. We called the people and they said that we were looking for a white van. Andy asked me if we were going to get tile or doing a drug deal? Not sure! We finally found the windowless white van and well, that was the right building--the warehouse had bird feathers everywhere from birds flying in through the holes in the windows, and no lights, so we propped the door open so we could see, and loaded up tile into our trunk. It may have looked like we were loading something illegal into our car. Our tires about hit our wheel wells we were loaded down so much. As we drove away we were happy to have our tile and not to have been mugged. The risk was worth it! We got an amazing deal on the tile and our bathroom looks awesome! Here's a couple of pictures:

After we finished the bathroom, we immediately started looking for tile to do in the rest of our house. You may remember we left that old gross carpet in the family room and hallway, so we were eager to get in something that looked a little bit nicer. We found some porcelain tile at Lowe's that was on clearance, and we jumped on it! We were lucky because they thought that they only had 1/2 palette but their inventory was wrong and they had just enough for our house! We rented a truck from Lowe's for 75 minutes, but they couldn't load both palettes on the truck at once because they were too heavy, so we had to be super fast! We made it back with 5 minutes to spare! The tile took up a pretty good portion of our garage.

The next 2 weeks were completely consumed by tiling. Andy would work on it all day while I was at work, and then I would get home from work and help him tile. We'd take a dinner break, tile, shower and go to bed and start all over again the next day! I'll be honest I was so sick of tiling by the time we finished that I think I'd be content to have at least a 10 year break from tiling and it could be too soon. BUT here is the finished product:

Two weeks, two sore backs and almost 900 square feet later our house is looking good!