Hot Chocolate Anyone ?

Still a little while before renovation is started @Faith-and-Hope @Shaz51 but nice to do a bit of dreaming.

Sorry - this is not a Cup of Coffee (or Hot Choc).

My Jasminum mesnyi is flowering - Yippee!

The first flowers that I've seen on it in ages - Yellow with No scent.

It's grown almost as big as this picture....

Lovely jasmine @Adge. 🙂

@Former-Member, ages ago we started collecting garage sale and giveaway/throwaway building materials for our long-delayed renovations. We've got a lot of tiles for kitchen/bathroom/laundry or wherever else needed, in assorted shapes but a limited colour range. Blacks for floors or sun-absorbing walls (winter thermal mass) in the bathroom, white for walls that need to stay reflective and cool, some nice pale greens that will probably go on the laundry walls, and some sandy coloured low slip floor tiles. Those ones are worth about $15 per pack new... we got about 20 packs for $25. Not all our "bargain buys" have been that good, but they've all been very reasonable compared to retail. We'll also be salvaging and re-using whatever we can of existing house fittings. But the a/c sheet is definitely not staying. Ooh yuk. On numerous levels.

I'm thinking to jazz up our plain tiles I might do mosaic dado inserts. That would give a bit of personality to the rooms without becoming an insurmountable task. And would be a way of incorporating bits of history dug up in the garden- I find quite a lot of blue and white fragments. 🙂

On the topic of tiles- cake on a slate, anyone? 😛

..,,, and a cake that looks like it has been tiled @Smc @Former-Member

All served on this tray @Faith-and-Hope @Smc

There is shabby chic (which I love) vs plain shabby (which I am trying to avoid) and tiling is one area where a poor job is really noticeable.

@Former-Member, I've seen professionally done tiling in expensive venues where things were out of square, and even cracked tiles that had been used with a bit of grout filling in the crack.

Hoping to do our own tiling, but am also hoping I can get into practice on areas that won't be too visible. 😛 A lot of it seems to be down to taking the time needed and paying attention. The muffed up professional jobs may have simply been rushed jobs.

Tile Bikkies!

My mum practiced laying tiles by making a chess board from 2.5cm x 2.5 cm tiles @Smc . They weren't black and white, they were sort of opalesque blue and opalesque ivory ..... it was really beautiful. She worked out the skills, and mistakes, on the craft piece before tackling a laundry floor.

I've done a little bit of mosaic work @Faith-and-Hope, which was fun, and challenging. I used broken pieces of some of my pottery "failures", so they had slight variations in thickness, some were a little bit curved, and I needed to find pieces that fitted together well in a wavy pattern. It was a small piece (brick sized) for a one day workshop. I could do mosaic/tiled concrete pavers for around the garden as practice runs. 🙂

I could really totally go to town in the garden, on all sorts of surfaces.... one day, I might have my own Park Guell, or Margot Knox Garden, or a New Old Curiosity Shop, or Watts Towers...

Will come to see the images when they have cleared @Smc .🌷