Boom. Done. Tile.

I had planned to space out the kitchen updates to not bore delightfully overwhelm you with every. single. decision. but it's all going so fast that if I don't explain to you about the tile right now you'll never get to rejoice in such minor details.  Minor details that will no doubt thrill you like they thrill me.  Minor details that may or may not have kept me up at night but whatever!  


Aaannnnnyyyyway - TILE.  This was easy.  It wasn't like choosing the countertops where I was floating in sea of cold stone I couldn't afford because I really only had one option for the floor.  Many of my neighbors probably have vinyl tile but if I'm already gutting this beast of the underworld I might as well do it right.  Fortunately I knew what I wanted.  Black tile.  

via Desire to Inspire

I know black might seem like a dumb choice for a floor - particularly for a kitchen floor - but I don't care.  I WANT it.  Many of the kitchen inspiration pics I've already posted have it (here, here and here) and obviously if you find it on the internet it MUST be a good idea and totally awesome.  So I'll have to sweep (with my sock feet) a bit more or get Charlemagne laser hair removal for Christmas.  It's manageable because it's just so sexy.  The floor that is, not Charlemagne.  

But I ain't all lazy sock feet housecleaning and hairless pussy jokes - I have smarts!  I think a dark floor will make the surface area of a small and awkward space like mine recede and bring your eye up to where the hot cabinet action is.  The floor will be - surprisingly! - grounding and earthy.  "Earthy" because you'll be able to see every piece of dirt and debris you've just tracked in from outside but it doesn't even matter because your eye will totally be looking elsewhere!  I'm a genius!  At night the cabinets will appear to float and I'm for DAMN sure my neighbors don't have that.

So the floor of amazing blackness (Omigawd is that racist?  Can I say that?) was finished today!!

Boom.  Done.  I almost peed myself.  It's pretty filthy here but I'm sure as hell not mopping right now.  I saw it before the grout and it was so inky and beautiful that YOU will pee yourself when you see the final reveal of amazing blackness (I'm just going with it now...).

From the dining room looking in...

You'll have to deal with the lighting because I only had about 5 minutes for pictures before I went to eat Mexican food - uh... because I don't have a kitchen - and I think we all know which one of those things is most important.  That queso doesn't eat itself, y'all.

Here I'm standing at the "sink" looking at the former gates of hell in the most idiotic use of doors and walls ever constructed by man.  This is what you get when you have a pentagon in your house.  At one point there was a swinging door on the left and a real door on the right for all those special times when you wanted to feel like a prisoner in your own kitchen.

Full on design boner.  I cannot tell you the joy it brings me to have these surfaces be perfectly flush with each other either.   Well, I can but then this might be the first blog post ever to receive an NC-17 rating and I obviously want you to be able to read this to your children as bedtime stories.  The contractor didn't sub this out and my project manager did all of it.  I came home the first day after he'd already set about 25% of the tile to find that he didn't use spacers and my entire body immediately broke out into a sweat.  He assured me he didn't need them (probably once he saw my face drain of color) and he was right.  He did a good job.  I know because I measured after he left...

So enough gushing over the floor hotness, the other tile in the room is getting jealous.  I debated over what to do with the backsplash since it wasn't a necessity so to speak - I'm on a budget ya know - and I could just get one of those little *gulp* 4 inch fake backsplash thingies and it'll be....  NO!  Do not fall victim to your cheap ways yet again!  Don't forget the bargain-priced garden hose incident of 2007!  So once I decided to take the leap I knew I wanted very neutral and rectilinear to coordinate with the floor but not quite so rigid as a static grid...

Don't forget the endorsement checks AKDO.  kthnxbye.

Boom.  Done.  First tile store, first 15 minutes.  In addition to finding my dream tile so fast I discovered a latent love for tile that I wasn't aware of until I was within it's cool grasp.  Since I've never visited a tile store other than the dingy aisle at Home Depot I was unaware of its affect on me.  The tumbled beige backsplash found at the big orange box makes me foam at the mouth but I think I found an isolated room at the tile store and rolled around on a whole wall of Walker Zanger tiles.  I don't think the employees saw but even if they had NPR was on the radio so they seemed like tolerant ladies.

Of course, I found my tile so fast that I began to second guess myself.  I hemmed and hawed around after that because I was unsure about the sample color they sent so I ordered other samples, shopped around, made unsure frowny faces, was seriously tempted by a sample called 'Unicorn White' and had Nick The Designer (that's his first, middle and last name btw) slap me around a little bit before finally just going with my gut on my first choice.  

Just like I said.  Boom.  Done.  Tile.  Damn, this is easy.

[Update:  It has come to my attention - probably because I was drunk on queso after my Mexican feast when I wrote this - that I forgot to actually tell you exactly what kind of floor tile.  I'm a horrible blogger!  It's porcelain - somehow I assumed you guys knew what it was because you're all so awesome.  And in my effort to be pretty transparent about this process the floor was about $4 a square foot and the backsplash was about $12.  Neither were fall-off-the-truck kind of black market pricing that would make you stab a grandma who got in your way of a bargain but reasonable.]