A knight on the tiles

A knight on the tiles

or... Belle's unerring instinct to select the most expensive thing in the shop.

29th March 2010

Belle is a quality lady and she seems to have a knack of looking down a row of options and unerringingly homing on the most expensive, without even looking at the price.

As you will know from previous posts, I have spent the winter remodelling Wand'ring Bark's shower room. Things have progressed well with a new basin installed, a new vanity cupboard over it and most recently a new wardrobe squeezed in behind the door. 

The next task is to re do the shower itself, which shouldn't be expensive as we are keeping the shower tray and taps, so we are only talking about a few tiles. To be precise, we are talking about 2.75 metres square.

The finished product

I wouldn't presume to source the finishing touches without my personal style guru, so Belle and I set off for B&Q in search of inspiration. Having looked at big tiles, small tiles, mosaic tiles and everything inbetween we were veering towards the B&Q budget brand when herself laid eyes on these shiny brushed steel tiny tiles, stuck to a mesh backing. "Ohh, I like them" she said, "ohh, I like them a lot - how many boxes do we need?"  Answer - six, but there were only three in stock and they were pretty battered.

We saw an assistant and were told be could go to Redditch who had some in stock, or order them in for collection in a few days. "OK, lets order them"

The assistant duly enetered all our details into the computer and finally got to the total - "That will be £539.94". "What! - you have got a decimal place wrong surely?".  "No sir, they are £89.99 a box and five tiles to a box".

"Wow - thats £18 for a tile no bigger than a sheet of A4 paper! No way!"

If I was a gentleman I would have bought what must have been steel coated gold bullion and to heck with the cost. But I am no knight in brushed steel armour and nor do I have the money of an investment banker. So, it was back to the cheap end of the aisle where we found some rather nice rectangular 'underground' tiles which we bought, along with adhesive, grout and spacers - all for 60% of the price of a single pack of the bullion!

Like I said, Belle is a quality lady with very good taste. Sadly, our lemonade income won't stretch to the champagne lifestyle she unconcuiously leans towards!

Footnote: This entry was bumped by my rant at finding 11 black tiles in one of the boxes, and B&Q's refusal to do anything about it. Of course, they have yet to respond to my complaint.