When I began construction on a small ruin of a house in Andalucía, Spain…
… I thought I knew how to communicate with the construction workers. After all I’m Spanish, I speak the language and I knew exactly how I wanted the house to look once finished. But each day as I would go to the house to give instructions and have planning meetings with the masons, brick layers, plumbers and electricians, I discovered that we didn’t speak the same language at all.
Half the time I had no idea what we were talking about…
The reason for this was that each industry has jargon specific to their trade. Therefore walls were not just walls, depending on what they were made of they had a different name, and tile wasn’t just tile but perhaps pavement stone or ceramic or porcelain depending what it was made from and where it would be used, although to the untrained eye all appear the same.
So the day came when I had to select flooring for the house…
There were literally thousands of choices from stone, ceramic, porcelain, marble, granite, and zillions of other types of tiles and pavements that made my head spin. Not only were there different types of tiles from different materials but within each material there were different qualities, textures, colors and designs. There were also imitations of originals and originals that imitated fakes.
I learned slowly to speak an entirely different language, but it wasn’t easy…
I imagine there are more than a few people who are remodeling a home or building from scratch who have a similar experience and find themselves looking up terms in dictionaries just to be able to choose a floor tile or a wall treatment.
I decided to write about some of these odd words and the options that go with them…
I know it will require a construction terminology encyclopedia to catalogue all the many kinds of tile and flooring choices on the market today, so I will only focus on ONE – a high quality flooring option called Travertine; also known as Travertine Tile or Travertine Marble.
Buy Travertine Tile is therefore a site that I dedicated to YOU who are also struggling with the terminology of the construction world. I hope the information will be helpful.
