The lovely pink and gray bathroom in EarthaKitsch’s 1956 house has a gaping hole in the vintage mosaic ceramic floor tile, courtesy of a previous owner’s need to get to pipes underneath. Eartha K is a longtime reader… remember when I wrote about her delicious knotty pine kitchen? Now, she and DH putting finishing touches ont he bathroom but Drats! They need to fins some tile to match. I volunteered to marshall the Retro Renovation readership forces (and the retro decorating gods) on their behalf. Read on for Eartha K’s story…
Hey Pam,
Thanks SO much for offering to show our tile to see if anyone can help. We’ve scoured your blog and looked into all of the tile manufacturers listed and have also paid a fee for a service to search their warehouses for dead-stock portions of our tile. No luck. We’ve also been watching Craigslist and eBay like hawks to no avail. We just KNOW that somewhere out there, someone has some of our tile sitting in a dusty shed or is about to rip it out of a bathroom. We had a tile person come out to the house, and he said that there is a slight chance that he can harvest some tile out of our bathroom linen closet but that since our tile is laid straight onto concrete, there might be more loss than gain. We found some fragments of our tile in a trash pile in the brambles at the edge or our property but there is no maker or other info on the back of them. We recently saw our tile in an estate sale house so we know that it wasn’t something rare.
So, that’s the scoop on the great (or not so great) tile hunt. The colors are a peppy (and kind of Pepto) pink and a sort of blueish gray. The sizes are 1 x 1, 1 x 2 and 2 x 2. I’m attaching photos and will also attach a photo of the patch job that was done sometime in the past. Our house is on a concrete foundation and we’re guessing that someone had to get to the plumbing through that hole in the floor. Then they slapped some random tiles in haphazardly and called it a day. I never will forget the day that we first walked through this house. We went into that pink bathroom and angels started singing because everything was original…pink…pink…pink.
…glorious. Then the realtor said, “There is something under the rug that you need to see…” When we lifted up that rug, we gasped. Then we bought the house. We’ve worked hard getting the bathroom spiffed up and rejuvenated with repair work and by bringing back some period details … but that hole in the floor keeps us from being able to say that our job is done. It haunts us.On a comical note, when we finally found the perfect color of bath rug to match our bathroom, we drove all over the county from one JC Penney’s to the other, snatching up all of their stock because they were being discontinued. I have this fear of being in this house for 50 years and all of my bath mats getting too ratty to cover the hole in the floor anymore. Thus, I have become a bath rug hoarder. : )
Thanks again!
What do you think, readers? Can you be on the lookout at Re-Stores and craigslist and the like and if you see any New-Old-Stock, post an alert here? Meanwhile, I have a few more sources for new tile today that might do the trick. I will post them tomorrow and Saturday.