This is something that was in my mind for our house that I've been renovating for more than two years (with more years to come...). This house was deserving a beautiful, welcoming thing right from the entrance.

This cost me a lot of time (more than one month, every day), some sleepless nights wondering how the next steps would come along, but very little money. It was made out of scraps from the travertine floor I'm installing, a carrara marble countertop from a rotten bathroom cabinet the previous owners left, and a pink marble scrap I got from the monumental mason of the nearest town (had to give him a few tenners, dude ain't giving shit for free). I also bought a sheet of expanded metal as a backing.

I cut the marble pieces with a grinder and a regular diamond blade and refined them with a diamond bit with finer grit that mounts on the grinder. I also cut the marble bands with a cheap wet saw. I then proceeded to cut thousands of cubes, first cutting bars of travertine with the wet saw, and breaking those bars in cubes with a carpenter pincer (had to find a clever way to mount it on a plank and lengthen the handles, cause that was hurting my hand too much). Estimate is \~5000 cubes, which makes 17kg. My daughter and I then stuck the cubes on the metal backing. This was fun, but it took quite some time. Once the mosaic was fully filled, I planed and polished the whole thing with the grinder. Then I placed it on the floor (my son helped me, it wasn't that easy either - shit was heavy and huge), where it belonged to.

The design was decided by scrolling through countless floor mosaic images I searched on the internet. I initially wanted to make a single big flower in the middle with interlacing curved bands like for the frame, but the pink marble was too fragile for cutting this easily, so I made a dozen of smaller flowers instead (yeah, it's a bit cheesy, but I fully embrace it). Also, because I'm an egotistical dude, it needed to have the initials of me and my wife embedded somewhere - but not too visible either cause I don't own up to my own narcissism (and my wife wouldn't let me make it too obnoxious). So the initials are actually huge, but simply hidden in the way the small cubes are laid out. Clever, eh ? Now, this house is ours forever. This shit is here to stay for generations... or not, I don't really care what the next owners do, in fact. But as long as I'm here, I'll put my mark, cause I'm the one caretaker of this house.

I love doing this stuff, I love this house.

I had more time than money, and wanted to have a special entryway.