Getting What You Want – Lake House Edition

If you haven’t seen my post on Instagram or our Facebook page from today, you don’t know about the small bit of drama from yesterday. And that little drama has everything to do with today’s entitled post. ?

First of all, I care about details. I am very particular on how I want things to look, especially once I’ve {finally} caught the vision for a room or space.

Such is the case for the master shower at the #lakehousereno project. The original vision was for white 4×12 tile surround – with imperfect edges. When Home Depot delivered all 16 boxes in small pieces I had to pivot there, switching to a 3×12 similar tile I could get at Lowe’s {It took 5+ hours and going to over 6 stores to get all the tile…}. Then I was using a 1 inch hex Carrara marble tile for the shower floor, but when I realized we didn’t have enough I had to pivot once again, to a Carrara penny tile. Wondering if this shower would ever come together – things were taking much longer than they should have – we were told everything was finished over the weekend.

Note, this shower is a really wonky shape due to pipes and cinderblock walls so the more we could hide imperfections the better.

Yesterday morning we showed up at the project, fully prepared to get to work, clean up a few things and assess what still needed to be completed. And as we walked the house with our contractor, let’s just say I got curious and made my way into the master bathroom to check out the ‘finished product’.

As I stood there staring at what I thought was going to be a beautiful penny tile floor…I sighed somewhat loudly and let my head fall backwards.
I heard Andrew from the bedroom, “Oh…you weren’t supposed to see that yet.”

He walked in and I said, “I hate this. This isn’t what I wanted.at.all. Where is the penny tile? Why is there 12×24 marble slab IN the shower floor???”

There have been liberties taken with some small design elements by the guy tiling the floor. Most of them I’ve been okay with, but this was something I couldn’t live with and would not compromise on.
I get it that some of you may look at this and say it’s beautiful or what is my problem, but here’s the thing.
I don’t like it. I have to live with it and it’s not what I wanted. I wanted penny tile and the last time I saw this shower floor there was penny tile laid out just how I wanted it. The other thing is, as you look at that photo above, the drain isn’t centered and it shows up more imperfectly because of the added marble slab. If it was all penny tile, as I wanted, it would be less noticeable.

I’m not entirely sure what happened, but long story short, we asked him to take out what he had done; I purchased more penny tile {praise the Lord, it was still in stock} and it will be redone the way I want it, hopefully today. I will say that there are a few things that we are taking concession on at this point with the lake house because of our time crunch, but something like this has to be redone.

Here’s my deal. If you’re paying for something to be done a certain way, don’t settle. It’s your money – hard earned and carefully spent. If you don’t like it, if it doesn’t fit or doesn’t work – you’re paying for it, so ask for it to be made right.
You may be thinking you’re not good at that…well, I’m not either. Unless I’m in a mood of directness which I guess I was in yesterday. ? But as I would encourage myself, I encourage you to get what you want, and ultimately what you are paying for.

I hope you enjoyed my soapbox.
Until next time {and hopefully less dramatic}…