Conquering My Fear of Tile
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman  |  Sep 28, 2007 12:18 PM

Dadgum shower. It started this whole thing. If it hadn’t decided to allow its grout to slowly break apart, water never would have seeped through the cracks and into the floor and we never would have needed to have it retiled, which means we never would have decided to go ahead and make the shower bigger “while we were at it,” and we never would have decided to redo our vanities “while we were at it,” and we never would have decided to rip the old carpet out of our bathroom, and we never would have knocked out the wall of my vanity so we could expand our laundry room, and we never…well, you get the picture. In all my years of dreading home improvements, I never could have predicted that something as simple as a shower could stir up so much mischief.

And I never knew re-doing a bathroom could be so much fun!


First, to get even with the shower for causing so much trouble…



I decided to punish it by having a crew of workmen rip it (and the surrounding bathroom) to shreds.



Take that, shower! That’ll teach ya to leak.



And here it is…our new bathroom!
Just kidding.


As the guys kept themselves busy building and framing the new shower, I had a few days to reflect on what kind of tile to use. It’s probably now that I should point out that tile—tile of any kind—is the one, solitary reason I will never build a brand new house. When it comes to tile, there are just too many choices, too many combinations and permutations possible, and the whole thing just makes my eyelids twitch. When Marlboro Man and I moved into this house—the house his mom built over thirty years ago—I was fortunate she’d had the taste and foresight to have chosen the floor tile she did:



Known as “Mexican Tile” or “Adobe Tile” or “Sautillo Tile,” it’s the only—I repeat, only—floor surface I can imagine having in a house on a busy, messy, dirty cattle ranch. Its subtle range of imperfect colors means I can avoid sweeping for days and days before anyone notices, and what’s the purpose of a good floor covering if it won’t help you avoid domestic accountability?

When we redid our kitchen five years ago, I was so scared of tile, I flat refused to go there—so I chose countertops and backsplashes made entirely of stainless steel sheet metal. I have an unnatural fear of grout, is all I’m saying. And several weeks ago when the contractor gave us the bad news about our shower—“You’ll have to retile it,” he said—I ran screaming from the house. Later, Marlboro Man finally found me hiding in the hay meadow and told me to come back inside, act like a woman, and face my fear of tile once and for all.

And after weeks of soul searching, meditation, and prayer, I did just that:


It’s called Subway Tile.



I think they call it subway tile because it’s commonly seen in subway stations around the world. It’s rectangular, 3 x 6 inches, and is often laid in the brick pattern you see here. I like it because it makes me think of subways, which makes me think of my first true love—The Big City. When I look at subway tile, I’m suddenly whisked away in my mind to a subway station in New York…or an L Station in Chicago…and I always feel centered again, like I’m back where I belong.



Then again, in certain light, subway tile can also look a little like Shawshank Prison Tile.



But that’s nothin’ a little grout and earth-toned floor tile can’t cure!



If anyone reading this is experiencing an unhealthy fear of tile, grout, or mortar, I hope you’ll find encouragement in the words of this post. If I can get over it, so can you.



Subway Tile. If you’re a desperate housewife living in the middle of nowhere on a working cattle ranch, it’s the perfect way to bring the big city to your bathroom!

If only it came with a Starbucks next door.

Next up: “Glass Shower Doors and Shyness Do Not Mix”