Selecting vendors and contractors - let's focus on tile

 Oh boy.

After we got the first quote back for our General Contractor, we were shocked by the size of the bid. Not that we expected this to be cheap, but it felt as if there was a "Frank Lloyd Wright" premium. And maybe there was, or maybe the extensive work we needed, and some of the choices we made for materials force the price up.

There are some "rules of thumb" in construction, and that usually works pretty well. But in our first pass, we sort of ignored the price of various materials (tile, especially) and focused on the "look" of the results.

Original Pewabic tile alongside the Casota Limestone, and my foot.

The problem with that is that one of the rules of thumb is that the installation of the tile is about equal to the cost of the tile. (just like in the olden days when you expected the cost of software should be equal to the cost of the hardware.) But that resulted in a cascading price that added probably 30% to the overall cost of the project. The tile we like (and will now use sparingly) is Pewabic, a ceramic manufacturer that was founded in 1903, and used in many Wright houses. You might recall this:

You can see the layout of the tile on the floor. I don't think this is the final design.

Here are some other designs we are considering:

It is more complicated that it should be selecting what we want.

The first prices of the tile and installation came to about 13% of the total project cost. That seems unreasonably high, so we are looking at other options.

When we "Value Engineer" (term of art) the tile project, we can get the total tile cost down to under 10% of the total deal. Maybe less. That is a big savings.

We have a total of about 443 square feet of tile we will be installing. 45 in the "little" bathroom, 158 in  the primary, and 240 in the guest. The guest is the largest area because we are replacing the floor and the wall. It was originally the most expensive due to the tile we were looking at, but we changed that selection (we Value Engineered it) it became much more reasonable.

We are still working through these numbers, but we are getting close.