Geek At Heart

(cross-posted at Suburban Guerrilla)

I have a soft spot for historic preservation.

Our seventy-five year old house has pink and blue tiled kitchen walls that were drywalled over by some previous owner, presumably for the sake of sanity and the protection of household retina. But in the name of restoration, I ache to remove the drywall and restore the tiles no matter how nauseating a pastel pink and blue kitchen might be.

And then there’s our bathroom, which is the same size as our smallest bedroom and whose walls and floor are tiled in the once-chic combination of black and salmon, which has been known to cause the same sort of irrational terror as clowns, and has caused more than one of our guests to leave the house in search of a public restroom.

SO wants to remodel it to something more subdued and add a big jetted tub to fill some of the echoing space, but like Quinn Cummings, I have repeatedly stood my ground on the basis of keeping it historically intact, regardless of how delightful a big jetted tub might actually be. Until now.

They say everyone has their price; mine is evidently just a little more…unusual than most. It turns out I would happily toss the pastel tiles of my convictions aside and gut my historic bathroom for these mood tiles.

I can’t entirely explain why I need them; I just need them. I’m so blind, I can’t even see in the shower, and I’m not diligent enough to maintain most-of-the-time black tiles, but I need them.

Fortunately for my bathroom (and probably my long-term sense of style), temperance is preserved by way of an astronomical price tag.