Tile carnage

While picking through a pile of house parts that were in route to the dumpster, a Brownstone Detective found this:

Paint covered tile

It’s a section of the tile that surrounded a fireplace, with the wall still attached to it. It was covered in silver paint, probably spray paint. I know from the real estate listing  photos that it was the tile that complimented the fireplace mantel  currently  disassembled in my cellar (one of the three Killian Brothers mantels I brought home). There was quite a bit of non-painted tile intact (not that it matters, because paint comes off tile quite easily).

It took about 15 minutes, some nail polish remover, a metal scraper and a Mister Clean Magic Eraser sponge. Now it looks like this:

clean tile

It’s the same style of tile of three of our fireplaces (parlor and garden), but it’s not an exact match: colors are similar, but it’s a much larger size. It’s also still attached to about an inch of cement. I have no idea what I’m going to do about that. I love love love love old tile. I have no use for it (due to the color/size discrepancy, not to mention the hunk of wall that comes with it) yet I’m happy I have it.

(which is probably what all headers say about every bit of useless crap they own).

(on a side note, I wonder if the people removing all this stuff know that one little piece of tile like this retails for between $7-9? And that the two large flower relief tiles that were part of this set sell for about $50 each?)

(sad)

Fireplace tile clean-up

The fireplace in the garden apartment looks like this:

It seems OK, until you take a closer look:

Varnish is splashed all over the tile. On the floor, the tile just looks sad. Sure, this tile is over 100 years old but it still has some life in it.

Enter my favorite tool in the whole universe:

Turns out the tiles had a layer of polyurethane on top. Some scrubbing and some Mr. Clean Magic Eraser did the trick:

While the tile is definitely showing its age, cleaning the gunk off it makes a huge difference. Here is the half way point with the right side cleaned up and the left side intact:

Here is a closer shot of the cleaned up border: