Plaster & Disaster

Whew! Not sure how to follow that exciting, happy news… especially with a damaged fridge still sitting squarely, stubbornly, unresolvedly in the middle of my kitchen. I’m a bit at a loss with this situation as Sears is still being unhelpful and unresponsive and yet we can’t let them just outlast us and neglect us into taking a damaged product.

So I’m going to address those dual issues in this post using the highly advanced and mature tactic of LOOK OVER THERE!

We’re going to look at some pretty pictures of kitchen tiles. This will distract you from the fact that I am actually no where near the point of actually installing tiles and will distract me from the ~~elephant~~ fridge in the middle of the room.

And even though this milestone is pretty far away, I have been devoting a lot of my mental energy over the last 3 months or so to thinking about tile, so I have a lot of ideas and dreams to run by you.

Despite the fact that I am attracted to over the top design and lots of color and pattern, I don’t actually intend on doing something totally crazy a la the extreme design inspiration I shared a little while ago:

While I love these totally mismatched tiles and bright colors, I don’t think my house can really pull it off without seeming crazy. I don’t have the restraint needed to balance it out in the rest of the design and I think it could look like a hot mess.

The tile styles that I am realistically considering fall into four main categories:

The Original Idea: Ornate Patterns

The original idea for the kitchen when Brad and I first talked about making it over was to do a very ornate Mexican Tile. In my inspiration pictures, this has reflected as an ornate pattern overall:

I love that this brings in a little of the “boho” vibe that I love but find hard to express in my design choices that often tend more toward modern and MCM for furniture and accessories. It is also a vibe that Brad likes, which is important. I just worry that it may be a little busy for our packed, open front of house, and that it may feel a little out of place in our 1950s ranch house located in colonial New England… not that that has stopped me in the past.

The Evolution: Graphic Cement Tile

However, as I got deeper into looking at tiles and inspiring kitchens, my love of the ornate Mexican Tile morphed into a love of the still somewhat ornate but more graphic and “cool guy” cement tile.

It feels like a nice compromise between a more modern aesthetic and the color and pattern that we love, and because the patterns are less crazy I feel like they’re less likely to get old for me. This is probably our most likely contender right now.

The Logical Next Step: Geometric Shapes

But I’ve also been drawn more and more to the extension of this appreciation of the graphic pattern of the cement tile – simple tiles in a beautiful color and an interesting shape.

What I love about this is that it is a punch of color overall, so it has huge impact in the space even if each tile isn’t as exciting on its own. It also is most likely to work in our favor for resell value since it is less particular than a pattern, even though that isn’t something we’re really worrying about as we plan to stay here for quite a while.

Returning to the Crazy: Stripes

Speaking of resell value… I just have to throw in something a little more crazy. I know I said I wasn’t interested in really crazy stuff but I have been drawn to a way to combine both the pattern and the saturation of beautiful glazed tile. Stripes!

Am I insane to consider this? It feels risky as it would be all on me to not get it wrong, but the effect could be so striking. Even if cement tile is our most likely contender, this is the one that gets me excited and dreaming. But Brad is no where near convinced.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about while I wait for this fridge to vacate my house. I’d really love to hear what you think. Which of these would you pick? Which do you think would work best for my kitchen? What advice do you have on good places to buy tile in these categories?

As I mentioned in our mid-year goals update last month, this year I’ve had some medical things going on that have taken a lot of my attention physically and emotionally, and it’s definitely slowed me down on the home improvement front. I wasn’t quite ready to share the details of all that yet here, but I figure it’s only getting harder to hide…. Case in point, here’s the behind the scenes of us painting our bedroom a few weeks ago:

The short version is: we’re having a baby. Yay! I’m now a little over 24 weeks along, due in early November, and we know the baby’s sex but we’re keeping it private until the birth. It’s been a pretty easy pregnancy, but during the first trimester especially I was exhausted all the time and had very little energy for anything besides going to work and occasionally doing strenuous things like moving all the furniture in my basement and then putting it back together again. The second trimester has been a lot easier, but hauling around an increasingly large bump is tiring especially given that I’m pretty small (I’m 5’3” and was ~115 – 120 pounds pre-pregnancy). Now that I’m moving into the third trimester in a few weeks, I don’t know what to expect!

I would say something gross like “this is our greatest DIY project yet,” but the longer backstory is that we had lots and lots of professional help – in the form of many AMAZING people at the Mass General Hospital Fertility Center, where we did IVF (in vitro fertilization). Thus in addition to the normal fatigue of pregnancy, conceiving this baby was a bit of an undertaking. We feel incredibly fortunate to have had success and I could never complain about how things have worked out for us. Still, the reality of the situation meant that even prior to the first trimester I was pretty tired and distracted for awhile, both because of the actual IVF process and the preceding period which involved a lot of trying and failing to start a family, specialists, tests, an infertility diagnosis, etc.

Celebrating our 10-year anniversary by waking up at 1:30am for Sam to plunge a giant needle into my backside in order to prepare for surgery 35 hours later. Making a baby is just as fun and easy as they warned us in high school health class!

At some point I may do a longer post about infertility and IVF in particular because it’s an interesting topic and personally I found it so helpful to hear about other people’s experiences when we were considering it and then going through it. But for those not familiar with it, the basic idea is that you stimulate egg production way more than usual via hormone injections, then have surgery to harvest all those eggs, then the eggs are fertilized in a lab, then an embryo (or more than one, depending on your age and history) is put back in, and then you see if it implants to start a pregnancy.

The exact combination and dosage of hormones is tailored to each person; in my case I was lucky to have pretty low dosages, but a single cycle was still 100 at-home injections (1-3 every day for 11 weeks in my thighs, stomach, and upper butt), about a dozen blood draws and ultrasounds, and several procedures. (An unsuccessful cycle would be fewer injections and shorter than that because if you’re successful, you continue daily progesterone injections for 6 weeks after getting a positive pregnancy test.) Because of all the medications, it is very expensive ($15-20K+ for a single cycle), but in Massachusetts health insurance companies are required to cover it if a doctor indicates it’s medically necessary in order to conceive. We didn’t pay anything more than co-pays for it, one of the many things we are so lucky for.

Anyway, that’s a bit more about why my home improvement projects have slowed down the last six months, and are likely to continue at a much-reduced pace as I get bigger and then eventually have another human life to care for. We’re excited, nervous, and grateful for the wonders of medical science!