Mosaic floor

Sometimes crazy ideas work out really well.

And sometimes they don't.

Oh dear.

As I like all things Roman and needed a new bathroom floor, what could be more obvious than doing a mosaic ? Find a suitable Roman pattern, do a bit of jiggling, get tiling. Simples.

Finding the right pattern was a doddle. It came from a Roman villa and needed only slight tweaking to fit the bathroom. The key part of the design was original.

Finding suitable tiles was a bit tricky, and a lot of the 7 000 or so used were hand cut. The actual choice of time was a huge mistake - a hole below the waterline - in that they had a slight dip towards the edges.

This is the process quite close to the beginning, with the key design element laid out but not filled in yet.

The main problem was getting all the tiles dead level. This isn't easy when there are so many. The Roman technique was to lay the floor, and then grind the whole thing flat. But then they had lots of slaves to do the donkey work. It must have taken forever, but the finished results were great. 

This is the key design laid out: the first of two panels. You can just see some edging.

And this is the first panel almost completed, with two areas left to fill.

And here is the finished floor.

As a design, it's easy to see that the two adjacent panels don't work. They are two argumentative horses yoked to the same chariot. It would have been good to spot this at the design stage. Or get the slaves to start again. But as it was only me and the floor, I just felt disappointed.

In terms of design, it was a failure.

The laying was a success technically, in that the floor was level. The difficulty was that the slight dip at the edge of the tiles resulted in very small valleys that your feet could feel. It was like walking on the surface of a giant brain. My feet were disconcerted, and I suppose everybody else's feet felt the same.

The valleys made it harder to clean than it should have been.

It took a long time to arrive at the design, and a whole lot longer to lay and to complete.

I did not love it enough, though, and it did not tale long to remove.

The heroic failure has been replaced by valley-free, very plain yellow linoleum and my feet are in heaven.

I tell myself that if you never fail, you are not really trying.

It could be true.