After renovating the bathroom and sorting out our woodland, we are now directing our energies back to building the extension on our little cottage. We have put down the foundation and built the roof and walls so it is not too long now before we can start work on tiling the floor. We wanted to be able to use a lot of found and gifted tiles and as they come in many different colours and finishes we needed to come up with a clever design to incorporate them all.
Our first design was loosely built on a rug in Bilbo Baggins study, from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, round with a lovely pointed star in the middle. But this design would only use up all earth and stone colour tiles so after some thought we decided to bring in the colours of the elements, and add another dimension to the design. Yellow for the east and air, Red for the south and fire, Blue for the west and water and Green for the earth and north. This also carries through our theme from our big stone circle in the garden. We do think it is important to honour nature and live a simple life and our floor will remind us of these values every day. Below you can see our first sketch and our most recent one, that we will base our design on.
We have been collecting tiles from skips and friends for a couple of years and now we have enough for the 40 square meter floor area and hopefully enough of each colour to complete the design. We will start by tiling roots coming out from our big tree trunk, stretching in all directions. The aim is to make it look like the tree is growing straight out of the floor. It is a very old hollow, gnarled ash that we have de-barked, treated with wood preserver and drenched in linseed oil to bring out its beauty. It is a bit dusty at moment due to all the work going on around it, but when the floor is finished we will clean it up and add a large cascading plant on top of it. You can’t see it clearly in the picture but it is quite a distance from the top of the tree to the ceiling.
Our star will start in the middle of the room, but the colours of the elements will come streaming out from the tree, slightly off centre. They will start off thin and become thicker as they come closer to the outside walls. The star will go from light close to the middle to dark close to the walls. This will enable us to use all our different tiles. We still have a couple of weeks work to do, finishing of the walls and exterior but we are hoping to start the mosaic floor in the middle of June. It will be a big project but should be pretty straight forward and a lot of fun. We will tell you all about how we get on at a later date. Below is a detail from our first sketch.
thegreenerdream 