Clash of the bath

Well, it's happened. The first major-ish redo of the project. I think....

The Icestone tub surround was installed, and it was all we expected and more—beautiful cobalt blue glass shards embedded in a creamy white terrazzo composition. Michele and I had the same vision—the Icestone would be the focal point of the new upstairs bathroom. That would mean white tile, painted cabinets (off-white) with the dominating color being the blues of the Icestone. We chose tile made—by hand—from recycled materials. That meant bigger gaps between the tiles to accommodate the irregularities of sizes and edges, which in turn implied bigger gaps between the tiles.  Challenge #1.

Challenge#2 was choice of grout color. Without thinking too much about it, we chose a gray grout, because the whitest of choices was actually a bit yellow—a definite clash. gray goes with blue, right?

Challenge #3: We used subway tile—3x6—arranged in a "brick" fashion with every other row offset by 3" from the ones above and below it. Put it all together, and you get something that looks like a brick wall. With gray cement between the white bricks. And a pretty harsh clash and distraction from our beautiful Icestone. Enter the large, very audible sigh. What could we do? 

Remove the grout, and find one that blended with the tiles, of course. Of course grout isn't meant to be removed, and a Dremel tool would be required. And a lot of hand work. Tedious hand work. With a steady hand so as to avoid chipping the tile. 

And then wherefore the right color grout? The whitest epoxy grout is light yellow for some reason. The solution came from Home Depot—a non-epoxy sand grout. White as the tile. Yee-haw. Our tile guy—a consummate professional and perfectionist—gave it his ok, and so we went for it. 

The result? Let's just say "and there was great rejoicing." Now we hope that this is our only big re-do. Knock on long-leaf pine.

—Michael