For weeks and weeks, I researched floor tiles online,
encouraged the cat to barf on the carpet, smiled when the dogs tracked mud on
it, and at last, I persuaded Dad that it was time to tear out the ugly
sea-green carpet and install floor tiles. He stood at the computer staring at
pictures of tiles, drove to Menards and brought home samples, said no to this
one and no to that one, while Mom kept saying she wanted harlequin. Coffee and
cream, alternating diamond-shaped tiles, with no thought whatsoever for the
resale value of our house. Finally Dad brought home a porcelain floor tile
called Ragno Rustic Ridge, and it brought to mind the old look of Spain, and we
all agreed this was the right floor. We tore out the ugly carpet. Dad got busy
with the yards of orange underlayment that go under the tiles. To our surprise,
the boxes of tile seemed to contain a darker and a lighter tile, and Mom got
her way with a sort of harlequin pattern of alternating darker and lighter
tiles. Things were looking pretty good. Until I noticed the fireplace.
The ignorant, evil woman who designed this house and lived
in it for two years before we did made so many, many bad choices. Mom says it
may have been that she ran over budget and had to cut corners, but i say it's a
simple case of bad taste. Who puts sea green carpet in their dream house? Who
would choose ugly, grainy oak trim if white painted trim cost no more? I'll
tell you who. The same ignorant, evil woman who'd choose 50-cent ceramic tiles
in a pale, depressed shade of gray for her fireplace surround. The biggest cost
of this fireplace was the labor, not the tile (even though we did not hire anything
done- my dad did it all himself and always does). No matter the price or the
type of tile, the same effort is required for spreading grout and slapping up
tiles and holding them in place until the grout dries. So why cut THAT corner
and install cheap, ugly, pale gray tile in a corner fireplace that is the
central focus of the main room? Worse, why would she choose cheap, ugly brass
strips for the grate? Plain black would have been better.
The idea of "real onyx" lit a fire in Mom's
imagination. With her on my side, it did not take long to convince Dad we
should go through with this fireplace remodeling job. We drove to Ar-Jay's,
Lowes, Menards and Home Depot. Mom loved all sorts of things until she saw the
price tag. Finally, because it was beautiful and less expensive than other
natural tiles, we agreed on marble. Emperador marble, a swirling brown and
black, would look good with the black insert of the fireplace and black grates
that convered the vents and air intake. We found a hole-in-the-wall store
called Floor Trader that had the best price on the marble, so we placed our
order and stocked up on more grout and waited two weeks for our marble to come
in.
Dad carted boxes of heavy, heavy, heavy rock tiles into the
family room, opened one up, and held a tile next to the new ceramic floor.
"What beautiful marble," Mom said. "Too bad there's so much
variation. Some of these don't look like the same stone, even."
Too bad Mom couldn't see the beautiful marble looked
terrible with our ceramic floor.
Too bad Dad couldn't see it either.
Finally, I said it. "This looks terrible."
Too late, they said. Special orders are not returnable. We'd
be out three hundred dollars.
They'd be out a lot more money than that if seeing the
clashing tiles caused me to go insane, but I did not use that argument on them.
I just got Dad to agree with me, finally, that the rich, warm brown of the
elegant Emperador marble clashed with the muddy grays of our Ragno Rustic Ridge
floor tiles. Mom made that terrible gasping noise she makes when she imagines
large sums of money going down the drain. And so, back to Floor Trader we went,
Mom staring down the guy who sold us the marble. With far too many words, she
stated what everyone already knows: things look different in the fluorescent
light of the store. And with natural stone, variations are so much more dramatic,
so what we saw in the store display just didn't look anything like what showed
up in the boxes we had special ordered, and if only he would take pity on us,
she would shut up. But the nice man smiled before she finished her speech.
"You can return this for an in-store credit," he said. I was back in
the corner flipping those huge panels full of samples before Mom could finish
heaving a big sigh of relief.
It took some arguing, but we settled on honey onyx, even if
it cost a lot more than marble. Two weeks later, Dad was carting in heavy boxes
again. The tiles were various shades of honey-gold, white and off white, in
swirling patterns caused by rain or rippling water. Dad bought a mighty blade
for his wet saw and stood outside cutting stone, a dusty, dirty job. He pieced
the stones around the fireplace inset, held them in place with support brackets
and waited for them to dry and harden. Two days later, he pulled away the
brackets. He put the black vents back in place. We stood back to take a good
look. And I said....
Yuck.
What happened to the pale honey onyx? This looked orange,
almost. Hawkeye gold, against those black vents.
I am tearing it down, I said. This will not do.
Mom made the terrible gasping noise, then said, "You
chose it yourself. Live with it." The onyx was cemented in place. Even Dad
just blinked at me and walked away.
Desperate, I considered all our options. I had never paid
attention to the brass strips that are part of the grates. Long narrow strips
of cheap, shiny brass. It had looked terrible with the depressing gray ceramic
tiles, and it looked even more terrible with the onyx and our nice, new,
Spanish-inspired Ragno Rustic Ridge floor tiles. I interrogated Dad until I
dragged the truth out of him: the black vents COULD be replaced.
With what?
Another long, arduous search at the computer led me to
replicas of Victorian grates, none of which were the right size, all of which
cost a small fortune.
Mom, Dad and I drove to antique stores in tiny towns,
desperately searching for wrought iron scraps or vents that Dad could
re-purpose for the fireplace. Nothing turned up. Finally, Dad found a website
for fences and one had a Victorian design he liked. He made phone calls to
welders, laser jet operators and a man
who calls himself Handsome Herb and loves to talk about his super expensive,
super high power water jet machine that cuts metal at the speed of light. Well,
at some super speed, anyway. Dad emailed him drawings, Herb sent an estimate,
and, wonder of wonders, Dad agreed to pay for custom fire place grates. Add
that to the cost of the onyx, and our fireplace was becoming a solid
investment.
A week later, we drove to see Handsome Herb's handiwork. Mom
made that awful gasping sound I've come to dread on discovering that the Herb's
estimate was for ONE grate, and we'd ordered TWO grates, top and bottom, so the
price was double what we expected. Oops.
The grates looked marvelous. Dad installed them, and with
the onyx, the Rustic tiles laid out in a diamond pattern, and the Victorian
grates, the whole room looked incredible. So European. So....elegant.
Dad's ugly black recliner would have to go.
The sofa, too.
"It never ends," Mom said. "You want and want
something, and finally you get it, and right away, you want something
new."
Back to the internet I went, pretending not to hear the
terrible gasping noise Mom makes when she pictures more dollar signs going down
the drain.
