DIY Update to Our Entryway with Beautiful New Tile

Well good morning friends! Today is a really exciting day because Mike is going to be laying down the tile, the new tile, in our entryway downstairs and so I can't wait to share everything he's done so far and show you the tile. It's absolutely beautiful. In fact you know what, I took a video I think just with my phone the day that it arrived and I laid some of it out so let me start by sharing that video with you. It is so beautiful. Okay friends the tile arrived. We've got some superheroes over here and I love this tile. It has the most beautiful stone look but it's porcelain tile and it is just absolutely stunning in person. It looks so worn and aged and old. Look at the detail. I went with three different colors to really try to get like an old world feel. So I'm playing with the pattern right now and I'm torn. I've got so many different colors here. Here's what the tile looks like. I can link it for you guys down in the description but it is just so pretty. So I feel like it looks so much better with the paint color, so much better with the gorgeous wood ceiling. I'm playing with a new sconce that I found at the antique store but I just I cannot wait to get this installed so I'm super excited. Okay so after we received the tile Mike went to work removing the slate. Now if you've been with me for a while you know we removed the same slate in our kitchen. It was installed by the previous owners and so we replaced all the slate in the kitchen with oak flooring to match the rest of our home. In the entryway though with Michigan Winters I wanted to stick with a tile. I searched and searched for something that looked like limestone and I just showed it to you. It's absolutely beautiful but first we had to remove all of that slate. What a project. If you have ever removed tile before it is back breaking labor and this past week sleep has been more important than ever for rest and recovery and so I just thought before I make the bed this morning I wanted to chat with you guys for a few minutes about the sponsor for today's video and that's Birch Living. So friends Birch creates fiberglass free mattresses and sleep products. We have the Birch Luxe mattress in a king size. We also have this amazing mattress pad on our bed which you don't need. It's just something that we added for extra support and comfort. We absolutely love our Birch mattress. All of our kids have Birch mattresses. I've shared them with you before. Let me tell you a little bit about Birch and why we love them so much. So first off like I said Birch mattresses are crafted with natural and organic materials. They're made with organic cotton, natural wool, and organic latex. They're also certified safe and fiberglass free. 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We know how important sleep is for our bodies and for our minds and so having a good mattress is just so important to us. All right guys so right now Birch Living is having their Memorial Day sale. This sale is incredible. It's from May 1st to May 25th and they are doing a 27% off sale site-wide. Just head to birchliving.com forward slash pine and prospect so that you could take advantage of this incredible offer. That's birchliving.com forward slash pine and prospect or you can scan the QR code that I'll have here for you on the screen. If you have been looking for a new mattress I highly recommend Birch. Go ahead and click on the link down in my description box below or you can scan the QR code here on the screen. Again that's birchliving.com forward slash pine and prospect for 27% off site-wide. So I have some fun things planned for you guys today. Like I said we are going to try to maybe start laying the tile in the entryway. Before we decide on the pattern though of how we're going to lay this tile let me just give you a brief recap of what Mike has done already. He had to tear out all of the slate in our entryway which was quite the project. Slate is really difficult to remove because it comes up in little pieces and it crumbles really easily. So it's just it's quite quite a project and we knew this going into it because like I said we'd removed the same exact slate in our kitchen but I think especially getting into the cement board underneath the slate that's when things got really messy and eventually we had to hang up some plastic just to prevent dust from getting all throughout the house and up the stairs and I was just so thankful for my husband that day. He did the bulk of the work and I just kind of helped out and watched the kids and he was able to remove all of it in just a few hours but it was quite the project. So after all the slate and the cement board was removed he also had to take the beam off of the wall because there was some slate under there as well. So after that beam was removed he was able to lay fresh cement board for the new tile. Of course he had to screw all of that down and then he covered all the seams with the cement board mesh tape and now we're all ready to go for the fresh tile. Of course we had to do a lot of dusting and cleaning and vacuuming. The plastic helped to prevent a lot of dust from spreading throughout the house but somehow it always gets through and so we've done a lot of cleaning the last few days and I'm excited today to show you just the process. I want to create sort of an old world feel for this new tile and that's why I went with different colors and so that's what we're going to mess with next. So I figured I would take you guys along with me and I have a few other things planned for today as well but we'll see how far we get with this new tile. All right guys well my cast actually went to the store to get a bucket and some tile spacers and the kids reminded me that I promised them homemade pop tarts this morning so I put the crust together last night and I'm just going to use some strawberry jam that we got from Costco as the filling and the boys already had scrambled eggs today so I know this isn't like the healthiest most nutritious breakfast but once in a while I just like to do a fun treat like this and it's of course a whole lot better than the store-bought version so I'm gonna fill these pastries with some strawberry jam and then we'll do a little glaze on top once they're finished baking and I'll get those in the oven for them. All right guys Mike is back and he's already dry fitting the tile I can't wait to show you. I've just come up with a little glaze here of water and powdered sugar and then I have these natural sprinkles with no artificial dyes that I thought would be fun to sprinkle on top but I'm just gonna finish these up real quick and then I cannot wait to show you what the tile is looking like in the entry and I also wanted to share sort of my inspiration for where I came up with the idea of this tile. Well friends the pop tarts turned out delicious they were sourdough by the way I forgot to mention that I will link the recipe for you guys down below the tile situation it's definitely a little bit more I tend to be an overthinker so I want these floors to not look perfect I don't want there to be a perfect pattern and it's amazing you think you're laying it out randomly and then you back up and it suddenly looks like it's checkered or it looks like you've got these angled rows of the same color so there's been just a lot of back and forth it's been a lot a lot more than I've shown on camera of us going back and forth with designs and patterns I'll show you in a little bit where I was kind of inspired we went to Germany in 2023 and I'll show you some photos and I just fell in love with this church we're in this historical town that we we visited called Esslingen anyways this church is the inspiration for my entryway for my floors and so I'll show you in just a moment we got to visit again this past February after Mike's mom passed we went back and had some coffee there not at the church at a little cafe nearby I'm just getting some bread in the oven actually I'm going to do my quick freeze method typically you want to take your bread and put it in the fridge for an hour so it can really firm up before you bake it but whenever I'm in a hurry like I am today because it's already lunchtime I'm just gonna stick it in the freezer for about 15 minutes and then we'll bake it up for about an hour so so when we went to Germany a couple years ago I printed every single photo that I took on my phone every single memory is in here from our trip to Germany and even photos like this where I just fell in love with just these old buildings and you can see the date here on this church is 12 20 which is just incredible but this was the inspiration for my floors so let me show you I have we went to Esslingen a couple of times this right here is sort of a further a shop that's further away with the blue doors there here you can see this one it's a little closer up and I mean it's just absolutely incredible but I just loved these walls and they sort of inspired the flooring for our entryway you can just see how much I loved all of the buildings there in Germany it was just magical but anyways this is a close-up of that same building and I just fell in love with it and I was kind of trying to recreate that and you can see there's sort of random smaller blocks some of them are longer there's different colors but they're all sort of in the same family so that was like the inspiration behind these floors as we were looking through these photos I just thought oh my goodness this is what I want to recreate here in our entry this is another church in Baltmannsweiler where we stayed with his grandma and there was a wall around the church that was just absolutely stunning you can see some of it here and it's very similar these big blocks different colors sort of randomized and so anyways that's kind of what I was inspired by so Mike is at the very end here so it's getting a little bit awkward because he's got more cuts here around the stairs but it's looking really beautiful so far I can't wait to see it with the grout it's really hard to tell on camera but what I love so much about this tile is all of the texture it has it truly looks old doesn't it babe I'm trying to see if I can kind of pick up all the texture on camera and all the different color variations I think just really gives it sort of this old world feel all of our entryway items are in the sunroom over here along with some instruments but I feel like it all looks so pretty right here I can't wait to get it back in there with the new tile and then these are our Germany albums that I just showed you guys exciting stuff all right friends it is a new day I had to run off to a doctor's appointment yesterday afternoon but Mike finished all the tile and it looks so beautiful I'll bring the camera over and give you a little close-up here of course we have to put the beam back in place and we have to decide on are we going to keep the Newell post that Mike and I built are we going to look for something old still some decisions to make here but the flooring the tile is in now we do have to grout still I'm thinking about going with like maybe an off-white color something cream maybe bone might be the color that I used in the bathroom but I thought it would be fun to show you a few recent antique store finds just to finish out this video I know it's been a little bit a bit random but I also just want to keep you guys sometimes when you see like beginning to end makeover video you assume that it happens so fast and it really doesn't at least for us it takes a lot of time we have other responsibilities and so these things just it's a process so let me take the camera off and just show you a sort of a close-up of the tile all right so once again we have to put this beam back over here we had it right there on the wall so that's what that random spot is there but this is what the tile is looking like it is absolutely gorgeous I love it so much it's very sunny today so I'm trying to keep the door closed so it doesn't blow it out but we went with a very random pattern to try to really make it look you know just old and sort of I don't know just not perfect you know we didn't want to go with this perfect pattern so really love the way that it's looking here's a view from the stairs just to give you a view from up top and just like that church in Germany oh Mike's about to walk in I've got these sort of random 12 inch squares here he's smiling no worries showing them your amazing handiwork and just because I know that people will ask we did end up going with a quarter inch grout line so pretty thick but again we were trying to sort of mimic what we see in a lot of old buildings um so he just did a wonderful job of course once the tile is grouted we'll have to put all of the quarter round back on and I'll have to do some caulking and it looks like I'll have to do some painting as well but it's just looking really really beautiful I could not love it more all right so I recently ran into an antique store and I've been looking online especially on Etsy I wanted to find something unique I don't know if you guys remember these um sconces that I thrifted for our living room and I love the fact they're just different you know like they're unique they have character and a story they're just so they're so precious and I initially when we started this makeover here in the entryway I purchased this on Wayfair I want to say and I think it's really pretty I really do but I was wanting something different something with more whimsy more character something a little bit more unique I also didn't like all of the the black maybe something brass or copper or just anything so I'm not a hundred percent sold on this but I wanted to share it with you look what I found at the antique shop for six dollars literally six dollars and let me just remind you okay it looks as if this is a hardwired sconce that I had in the wall it actually isn't we were going to try to hardwire a sconce there never actually finished the project and then years later we refinished our basement and now access to the inside of this wall is no longer so I'm not even sure if we would be able to hardwire it at this point so anyways I found this really cool copper sconce for six dollars in an antique shop recently and I just feel like it's really cool the next thing that I found that um I've been really playing with the idea of bringing more artwork into the entryway as well not a hundred percent sure if I'll use this in the entry but I loved the brass frame it's this beautiful print of cows in a pasture I just thought it was so darling and it was half off of 30 so I paid 15 for this vintage print you guys know how much I love these beautiful sort of landscape prints the little house or barn in the background the blues and the greens it just immediately I picked it up and I said yes I'm definitely going to grab this so I was really excited about this I have a a really hard time with a couple of different things in the antique stores I have way too many like bread boards and cutting boards and I have way too many baskets I don't know what it is about baskets I saw this basket and I fell in love with it look at this beautiful basket it's actually quite it's it's pretty large but it's kind of like a medium size has a lid which is incredible and I just thought it was so beautiful now I don't know if I will use it in the entryway necessarily but I just had to bring it home with me well thank you guys so much for coming along today the goal I think for this weekend is to potentially get this grouted if we're able to find grout we live like an hour and a half away from your home depots and Lowe's and all the things that's next is the grout and then I just can't wait to take you guys along as we just finish up this space and I love the blue I love the way it's looking so anyways I really appreciate you guys coming along with us today and I can't wait to show you once we finish the whole space if you're new to my channel I would love you to hit that subscribe button and I have a lot of posts over on my blog with entryway inspiration kind of the the way that our entry has evolved over the years here on my blog I started my blog almost 10 years ago so it's kind of cool to look back and see the little changes that we've made over the years but um anyways thanks again for watching guys bye