Choosing Counter-tops

Hi all. Just a short update as I won't get a chance to see the house itself until Sunday. Sunday is the first Rugby World Cup game in Osaka (Italy v Namibia) and we have tickets for it, so the current plan is to head over to the house in the morning to take a look around before the match. The stadium is only about a 40-minute walk from the house so we'll probably go on foot if the weather is nice.

I did want to put up a quick post to keep the momentum going and also to show one of the changes we made this week, the counter-tops in the laundry room. Actually, we hadn't really thought much about them and had to ask in a recent meeting what they were made of. It turned out they had defaulted to melamine board. We didn't really mind in terms of looks and cost but we were a little worried about how it would fare over time, given the fact that it will probably get water on it pretty often. The room in general is likely to be quite humid as we will use it for drying clothes when it's raining outside.

We asked about other options and tile was suggested, which we thought would be good with water and also a nice textural contrast (the walls are all wooden in this room). I was a little concerned about not having too deep a grout between the tiles in order that the surface could be as smooth and flat as possible. In retrospect, I'm not sure this is such a big deal.

We were given a couple of choices. Larger plain white tiles (either 20cm x 20cm or 30cm x 30cm) or a smaller matte mosaic tile (2.5cm x 2.5cm). We initially chose the larger tiles as we had seen a physical sample, but we decided to look at the mosaics too. We were sent a couple of sample pictures which were quite interesting and also showed the physical structure of the mosaic tiles.

The mosaic tiles. They are clear but matte so you can't really see through them.

The tiles would link to form quite a flat surface due to their shape.

The builders helpfully also gave us some aerial mock-ups of how the counter would look in the room with each type of tile.

The top is the 20cm tile, the bottom is the larger 30cm tile.

The mosaic tile option

It was quite hard to decide so we decided to visit the Osaka showroom of the mosaic tile company and see them in person. The mosaics were really nice to look at, filling with light when exposed to the sunlight outside which created some attractive shadow effects inside the tiles. We realised as well that their small size would make them much stronger and less prone to cracking so we thought they would hold up better potentially than the larger tiles.

In the end, we both agreed that the mosaics were the right choice for us. Let us know what you think!