Stephanie created a design that looked as though it could have been there since 1911. Most people are surprised when we tell them that this floor is brand new.

We used the tiles that are pre-arranged on the 12″ by 12″ sheets, but I have to say that they really didn’t work out as well as we hoped. There was a lot of slop in the manufacturing process, and MANY of the tiles were crooked or misaligned. Lots of them had to be pried off so that they could be reset in the mortar, and that created confusion while trying to set the black tiles in the spaces we had made in the white tiles. Since there were two of us working on it, we’d sometimes find that one of us had put a black tile into a space that was supposed to have a white one. There’s always a sense of panic while setting a large expanse of tile, but in the end it turned out just fine. The minor imperfections are never that noticeable once the whole room is done, and the probably subconsciously add to the the hand-done look.