Fish Tile

This was one of those jobs where everything went wrong from the beginning. This little fish mural is going to a house in the Bahamas, and the job came to me through a designer in Florida. Why are the jobs for designers always the most trouble? So since china paint is affected by the underlying glaze color, the fish couldn’t be done on blue tile. Besides, they were particular about the color of the blue tile. And they wanted a “handmade look”, meaning not flat or square. I could have made them myself, but I haven’t done that in years, so I had a local friend make these tiles and 40 sf of field tiles. They didn't like any of the 4 blue glazes she had, so we had her make them white and then I china painted them blue. This doubled the price for them, but they didn’t care. It was also probably 10 times what it would have been if they’d just used commercial tile. So we did that, shipped them off, and about half of them broke- probably because they were not flat. Having replacement tiles made and shipping them cost me about $700. Shipped them off and sent an invoice, including an invoice taped across the seam of one of the boxes so they couldn’t miss it. A week after I know they’ve gotten them, I email to see if they were OK. They waited 3 weeks before they even opened the boxes. Ten days after they tell me they’re OK, I ask if they’ve sent a check. It went out on Monday. Ten days later, has the check been sent? It went out on Monday. Ten days after that I finally get the final payment yesterday. This job started back in February. i hope they call again some day so I can tell them to go to hell.