Tiles, Toilets, and Taps

One of the exciting, but also daunting, things about building a house from scratch is that you get to choose everything. Everything!

We’ve already made hundreds of decisions about the house during the design phase. Everything from the floor layout and position of the windows to the colour and material of the gutters. And there are hundreds of decisions left to make. Our builder has narrowed the selection for us; they have certain suppliers for us to work with and helpful defaults to use as a starting point.

This weekend was our first big shopping trip to choose floor tiles and bathroom fittings. We started with the tiles, going through panel after panel of samples. We narrowed down the selection to handful relatively quickly, and then spent ages going back and forth trying to make a final choice. Are these ones too dark? Will these look dirty? Do these remind you of a shopping centre?

The tiles are going to cover a large area of our floor space. We’re going to see a lot of them. It felt like a weighty decision; something we had to get “right”.

Tiles finally chosen, it was on to the bathroom fittings- taps, showers, toilets, and bath. In comparison to the tiles, we breezed through these. Partly because we had a good idea of what we wanted, and partly because the choices were obvious.

That brought us back to tiles for the shower and bathroom walls. But by this time, we were running out of energy and indecision had started to creep in. I was looking without really looking. So, we’ve left that for another day, and I need to give it some thought first.

One final check to reassure ourselves that we were happy with our choices, and we were done.