I get a huge kick out of amassing great quantities of old junk. Not just junk really, but “junque.” That’s French and that makes it valuable. I kid, sorta. I’m a hoarder of old house anything: trim, mantles, stair parts, doors, tile. Frankly, if I think that I can use it for an art project or repurpose it into a renovation or restoration project, then I keep it in the basement. I dig using old salvaged house pieces in new ways: fireplace tile for backsplash mosaic, Victorian stained glass doors for bath doors, mantels for mirrored frames over bath vanities. A good friend once bought a bunch of piano legs from me and used them as stair spindles. She won the Urban Design Commission Award.
Antique Fireplace tile Repurposed for a Kitchen Backsplash
My basement is the great divider. In fact, I would say that people are either horrified by it (I once had a young guy liken it to the “Silence of the Lambs Basement”) or they are old house folks and they are enamored by the potential of the salvage pieces stacked willy-nilly. I have things down there that I have forgotten about—pretty things: things made of quarter-sawn tiger oak, walnut folding doors from the 1860s, buried stained glass 10 foot double entry doors, hand carved oak arches. When I get a moment to do a small smidgeon of organizing, I am as delighted as an archeologist finding a new species of curved beak pterodactyl. I happen upon a huge box of antique fireplace tile with a swirl of color, each layer requiring a separate baking in the kiln.
I learned the lesson of the value of fireplace tile where we needed simply 6 “brown” tiles to complete the fireplace surround. We took a sample tile to our local Callanwolde Studio to meet a tile artist. She charged us $300 to fabricate this “brown” which apparently was not simply brown, but red, green, yellow, and then a brown layer. Each layer of the encaustic tile demanded a trip to the kiln. And those babies shrink like silk in the dryer, so the potter had to triple the tile and hope that 1/3 didn’t shrink beyond our 1×6 inch demands. The end result was perfect and the fireplace was put back together, but I had a huge appreciation suddenly for those 100 + year old tiles.
