One Room Challenge Week 5: It's Tile Time

Week five of the One Room Challenge is here, and if you’re wondering why this update is a day late, it’s because I got totally caught up in the election madness and forgot. Wednesday got away from me, and before I knew it, I had fallen asleep before I’d finished writing up the progress. But better late than never, right?

If you’ve just arrived at DIY in PDX via the ORC blog, welcome! I’m Rachel, and I blog about everything DIY, from fixing up my old house, to making accessories and decor, to growing plants and cooking. For the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge, I’m sharing the gut renovation of the most-used bathroom in my house.

Hopefully you haven’t been losing sleep in suspense over my tile choices. (…This damn election is another matter….) As you can see, we went with the extremely classic white subway tile and black and white hex tile combo.

When my mom saw it, she even said that one of her grandmothers had the same tile in her bathroom.

I know that might seem boring to some people, but we plan to stay in this house forever, and we don’t want to ever redo this bathroom. As a fan of subway tile for literally decades, I know I’m not going to get sick of it. And we added some special details to keep things interesting. Like marble accents.

And chair-rail tile at the top.

I think I took all of these pictures pre-grout. Has anyone ever told you how hard it is to choose a grout color? I’d never done it before, and it was surprisingly difficult! I agonized over the grout color for hours, worried that I’d pick the wrong one. It’s really hard to visualize how it will end up looking. But we did finally pick one, and I’m pretty happy with it.

I think my little tile inspector approves.

Here’s an important caveat about this tile work. As I said at the beginning of the ORC, this bathroom has been done for months, and the tile didn’t take a week. It didn’t take two weeks. It took three full weeks. Our contractor said the tile sub-contractor had faster guys, but he asked for a specific tiler who was slower, but who he knew would do the best job. Since our contractor seemed totally honest and trustworthy about everything else, I don’t think this was hot air. It can seem simple, but there’s a lot to consider when tiling a whole room like this. I’m really glad we hired someone who knew what he was doing.