Mosaic..

When we first started moving into the house, one of the first things I did was to remove the medecine chest that was in the bathroom. It was a really huge, hideous thing, with fake oak wood trim, a fake frosted-glass door, and it was falling off of the wall. I didn't like it, and I figured it'd be a pretty easy thing to find a halfway decent replacement one.

It was actually harder than I thought it would be to find one of the same size that I actually liked. so we lived for a while with a big hole in the wall, which was actually kinda neat looking..

..and provided us with a place to put the secret name of the house for future generations of owners of the house to one day find and be mystified by:


Eventually I found a medicine chest I liked, in a style I wanted - a sort of semi-retro, simple, metal and glass style, with simple side-to-side sliding doors. Oddly enough, it also turned out to be about the cheapest medicine chest available too, which was kinda nice. I couldn't even find a more expensive one that I liked at all. Unfortunately, the size of the new one left about a 2.5 inch border around it, in the space where the larger older chest was, leaving a gap of either bare wood or drywall between it and the white tile with which most of the bathroom wall is covered.

After thinking about it for a while, it occurred to me to try to put a border mosaic in the gap there, made out of little broken bits of black tile, to sort of reflect the pattern on the shower curtain we'd bought..

.. and my plans to eventually paint black the ugly fake oak wood of the vanity, and the bare wood trim in the bathroom.

After doing a bit of research on how to make a mosaic and lay tile and grout and all that, I went out and bought a handful of black tile and some little square mirror pieces. I took the bag full of black tiles, and proceeded to smash them on the basement floor in their bag, until most of them were appropriately mosaic-sized and randomly shaped.

Taking the tile bits up to the bathroom, I then proceeded to spread out some tile adhesive goop in the area we wanted to put the mosaic, and enlisted the help of Kat to start filling in the area with random bits of broken tile and mirrors. The whole process of putting the tile down took probably about an hour, and I think it came out looking pretty cool!:



The adhesive has to 'cure' for 24 hours at least before you put the grout down to fill in the gaps between the tiles and all, and we haven't gotten to that part yet, but I'll probably do that sometime soon..