Here Comes the Sun

I finally completed a project 23 years in the making!

Back in 2003, we brought in the talented architect Marc Tarasuck and the skilled contractor Tony Parker to transform our unused swimming pool. They gave it a major makeover, filling in the space and creating a beautiful semi-tropical garden. Marc’s design for the tower is particularly impressive, featuring multiple arches, including a grand one inside and a matching one on the outside wall.

You can read about the project here.

So, when we were in Tecate, Mexico, buying tile for the Casita and stair tower, we stumbled upon a vendor selling pots and concrete statues. One of them was St. Michael. You know, we’ve been joking that he’s our house’s patron saint. There is a stained glass window at the bottom of the stairs inside the house that we think is St. Michael.

So, we bought the statue, and I added some tile and paint to the arch in the stairway to make it look like the ones I’ve seen in churches. I put up name tags for all the plants I’ve killed over the years, and it became known as ‘The Shrine Dedicated to the Dead Plant.’

Life got hectic, and I never got around to finishing the arch outside the tower in the garden. I had a lot of ideas over the years, but I never got around to doing anything with them. Decades passed, and I slowly settled on the idea of adding a sun mosaic. An old copper sun hung in the back of the arch for years. One day, my former garden helper Kathy texted me that there were some nice, reasonably priced dark blue pots at Ross Dress for Less. Even though I find the place a bit scary, I went to check them out and bought four large ones. Unfortunately, you can’t take the shopping carts outside the store. But the security guard let me park out front in the red zone, and I was able to wrestle the pots into the car.

At the same time, my current garden helper found a beautiful variegated Monstera Thai Constel at Home Depot.

I had been looking for a plant to fill the corner near the arch where the stair tower meets the big retaining wall. This retaining wall, which is over 50 feet long and 15 feet tall, was built in the early 1970s to settle a lawsuit with the city. They cut a steep slope below the house to make space for the swimming pool. This big wall was one of the reasons we built the stair tower to hide it a bit. To make it even less noticeable, we put a big fountain next to the tower and buried part of its base. I already had a few potted tropical plants there, but I was sure the Monstera would look amazing climbing up the wall. That’s when I finally decided to do something about it and tackle the task of tiling the arch.

So, I started by painting the huge white stucco wall to hide the black mold and water damage. I also gave the retaining wall a little touch-up.

Then, I got to work sorting through all the boxes and pieces of tiles I’ve collected over the years. Since most of the tiles and colors in the casita area are blue and yellow, I decided to stick with that theme. But guess what? I realized I didn’t have enough yellow tile. So, I asked my friend Jodi, who also has a collection of tiles and makes mosaics, if she had any yellow tile. Within a few days, she dropped off what she had. I found a photo online of a mosaic tile sun and used it as inspiration for my project.

I decided to install wainscoting tile similar to the one in the St. Michael arch. Instead of terracotta-colored tile, I would use deep blue tile that a friend recently gave me in a milk crate.

I figured it’d be easier to work on the design if I laid out the sun tile first on a flat board. Since the sun rays would need to be long and sharp, I decided to use a tile saw instead of tile nippers. I’m inspired by a photo I saw – the center of the sun would have deep terra-cotta tiles with yellow rays coming out of it.

It took me a while to figure out the next step, but I finally decided that deep blue tiles around the sun would make it pop…well, that and a friend recently gave me a huge milk crate full of 6-inch deep blue tiles. I decided to mix in some of the blue tiles and broken ceramic objects I’d been collecting. I also used some 2×2-inch lighter blue Japanese tile that I saved from a house flip project back in 2008. The tile had been in a bathroom shower there but was installed wrong and water had leaked behind it. I couldn’t easily break this tile with tile nippers, so I decided to just use it as squares. I laid out several boards of mixed tile and tried to mix up all the different tiles and lay them to look like they were radiating out from the sun.

While I was thinking about what to do, and I decided to head to Tierra y Fuego, right next to the Otay Mesa Mexican border crossing. There, I purchased a blue rope tile that I thought would look great at the top of the lower blue wainscoting. I also got some seconds of 4-inch yellow quarter-round tile and yellow 4×6 tile to go around the outer edge. And guess what? I had just enough pieces of a leftover yellow and blue talavera tile from an earlier to use around the outer edge of the blue wainscoting.

The next step was even more confusing, and I was starting to realize that this project would take way more tiles than I thought. But I wanted to use up all the random pieces of Talavera tile I’d collected, so I decided to lay them next. That still left a lot of wall to cover, though.

At this point looking through the tile I had left I decided I’d fill in the remaining area with more yellow tile. I had just enough to complete it only had 2 small pieces of yellow tile left. I was done with awful multi-day task of laying tiny pieces of tile.

Next, I tackled grouting the tiles. I used digital photos of the arch and AI to experiment with different grout colors.

I really wanted to use a color I usually use throughout the house, Sahara Sand. But that and many other colors have been discontinued over the years because white, gray, or black became the go-to colors during the COVID years. After much deliberation, I decided to use black around the sun. A color called Haystack was used around the rest of the mosaic. I just happened to have some left over Haystack grout in the garage. It also was the closest color available that resembled Sahara Sand. Finally, I found an unopened box of antique white grout in the garage and decided to use it with the blue wainscoting at the bottom of the arch. The existing terracotta tile on the floor of the arch looked like this color was used there too.  

I spent about half a day removing all the extra mortar that ended up on top of the tiles. When I started applying the grout, I noticed it was sticking to the tile surface and was super hard to clean off. This usually isn’t a problem with ceramic tile. I remembered seeing an unopened bottle of grout release when I was looking through the boxes of tiles and applied it to the surface of the mosaic tiles. That worked like a charm and the grouting went much faster. Unfortunately, as I was mixing up the final batch of grout, I added too much water and it was too runny to use. I tried to thicken it by mixing in some leftover pre-mixed Bright White grout. And then I waited a while for it to thicken up before applying it. It was just thick enough to finish the job and I’m the only one that will ever notice the slight color shift. One final touch, painting the metal surround on the downlight to match the grout and the project was done!

I was very happy with the results. One unexpected thing was the pieces of broken tile around the sun that came from a ceramic blue ball, reflect the light at the top of the arch and create little sparkling specs around the sun. Lot of cleanup completing it. I’m still trying to figure out the planting around the arch. I have a heliconia and a ginger placed temporarily in the blue pots I mentioned at the beginning of the post, but they are too tall and will block so of the view of the arch. I cutback and repotted into a low blue pot the begonia that was already in the arch. It had been there for over a decade and had become very leggy growing over the edges of the pot. It will slowly recover and put out new growth.

I was thrilled with the results! There was one unexpected surprise: the pieces of broken tile around the sun that came from a ceramic blue ball. They reflect the downlight at the top of the arch, creating a dazzling display of sparkling spots around the sun. It was a lot of cleanup to finish it up, but I’m still figuring out how to plant around the arch. I need to able to get the wall under the arch since this where the electrical outlet is for the fountain pump and outdoor lighting. It’s nearly impossible to dig a hole here due to all of the palm roots, so plants will need to be in pots, preferably blue. I have a heliconia and a ginger temporarily placed in the blue pots I mentioned at the beginning of this post, but they’re a bit too tall and will block some of the view of the arch. So, I cut back the begonia that was already in the arch and repotted it into a low blue pot. It’s been there for over a decade and has become quite leggy, growing over the edges of the pot. But don’t worry, it’ll slowly recover and start putting out new growth.

On to the next project. How to use all of these terracotta pipes in the garden…there are 190 of them.