I don’t think I ever told you about how I got the tiles I used in my design for Arlington Rooftop Bar and Grill.  The vast majority of the tiles were purchased through an online auction liquidation company.  Rasmus is very different from Ebay.  Auctions are local, pick up times are very specific, and merchandise is available for preview.  We were able to choose what we wanted a few weeks prior to the actual bidding, which gave us time to prioritize what we were willing to bid in order of importance to the overall design plan. 

Before I even knew about Rasmus, I had already become enamored with tile planks which mock hardwood flooring.  Some of the samples I ordered ran nearly $12 A PIECE, well out of my budget, and probably out of most of America’s.  So I guess it wasn’t too shocking to find plenty of palettes seven feet high in at least three colors of “wood stain” in our first round of Rasmus auctions.  We ended up purchasing four palettes.  The cost was cheaper than the most mundane Big Box Beige– we averaged about fifty cents a square foot. 

Purchasing tile this way worked for me.  I had a lot of wall to cover, so we only bid on the less popular large lots.  The auctions were at the beginning of my design plan, so I was very flexible, and I gave my clients a broad range on what would be acceptable to me to use.  Many of the choices in the auctions were stunning, and quite fashion forward. We ended up with shockingly beautiful, rich brown leather tiles, a nice granite-look for the restrooms, two tones of the fore mentioned wood, a huge palette of white embossed with a star for the Kitchen walls, gorgeous long thin gray planks, an a small lot of large wood pieces in two tones.

I chose five accent tiles that had to be purchased conventionally.  The invoice on these amounted to more than what we paid at Rasmus, and the quantity was one tenth.

My only beef—we ended up receiving one palette that was not what we bid on.  Our original order was for 774 square feet of 16 x 10 leather rectangular tiles.  We ended up with 13 x 13 squares in matte espresso.  Sadly, it took us three months to even realize the mistake, thus causing me to sacrifice part of my Memorial Day Weekend to figure out what to do about it.  Trust me; it’s not easy to see what you have when you are searching among 7,000 square feet stacked up in about 200 square feet of space.

And not really a beef, but more of a stressor is the fact that buying tile at an auction leaves zero room for error.  You can’t just order more if you run out. I have mapped, plotted, calculated and fretted myself gray worrying about having enough to finish an area.  Today I decided that every tiled wall needs an order of priority and a Plan B, so I took a fat Sharpie and did just that, writing directly onto each piece of sheetrock. 

And I am very thankful for clients who understand the importance of paying a little more to hire a chief installer who speaks perfect English and has good design sense.  But I know I won’t come down from the verge of a panic attack until the last piece is laid.