Philip Edwards:

"Dear Mr. Oosthuizen,

My name is Philip Edwards and I live in the U.K. Whilst trawling the internet I found your company and was particularly interested in your 'The Farm Yard 1 - 15' range of tiles. However, many of the tiles appear to be out of stock. Will your company be painting more tiles or are they painted on an order-by-order basis?

I would be looking to purchase 15 tiles to go on the wall at the back of my cooker, to be mixed in with plain tiles of a similar colour. The area would be around 2 square metres and I like the 100x100x10mm tile size. I am unsure whether the tiles I viewed on your webpage were the cast tiles or the handmade ones.

Ideally I would like the tiles within the next two weeks if that were possible.farm

I hope I have provided you with enough information and look forward to hearing from you."

Gerrit:

Thank you for the enquiry, Philip.

The website is mostly populated with surplus tiles from previous custom orders, and with the current sale these Farm Yard tiles are in high demand. I shall check our stock room for extra unlisted tiles and revert back to you.

Do you only want to buy the decorative tiles from us or the plain tiles as well?

We specialize in custom orders and we could however produce the tiles for you, two weeks might be a tad to tight, but 15 working days will be more feasible. The cast option takes less time to produce – but the hand pressed tiles has more character and is truly One Of A Kind.

The Farm Yard 1-15 is the handmade version but this could be produced with the more economic cast process. The following link has an image hand painted on a cast tile -

I shall update you within the weekend.

Philip:
I would be looking to buy 11 tiles (just drawn an accurate plan of the area behind the cooker) and would source the plain tiles from a local supplier. Would you have 11 Farm Yard 'spares' and if so which ones would they be?

Gerrit:

I have stock of The Farmyard –HandmadeBuff – it is 106 x 106mm with a crackle Earthenware glaze. If you are interested in these, let me know, and I could forward a picture of the stock at hand. I even have some whitish “raku like”, similar to the buff crackle, stock with animals, without corners, 106mm as well.

Gerrit: TheFarmYard-Handmade image is the 8 tiles that I have in stock, with some of them on the www.handmadetiles.co.za site, where your enquiry originated from. The cream here is a soft yellowish cream, and the most popular and is close to no. 4.

Philip: A decision has finally been made!

I would like 5 of the 8 tiles attached at 50%. I like the smaller pig (standing on all four legs), the hen and cockerel, the donkey and the horse. The other 6 I would like from The Farm Yard Collection as displayed on your website and are 1-1 sheep, 1-7 sheep, 1-10 cow, 1-11 duck, 1-14 hen - for the last tile, would your sister paint a goose? I've seen some nice versions of her goose on other tiles.

I want the newly-made tiles to match the ones on the attachment. I'm not sure if they are the cast ones or hand-made ones.

Philip: Payment has successfully been made. I did forget to give you the postal code for my address - it's EX15 2NT

Thanks for doing business so efficiently with all the emails you've sent me, it was a great help.

Dear Gerrit,

Apologies that is has taken so long but I've finally finished the tiling and my wife and I are thoroughly pleased with the result. The first picture shows the splashback for the ceramic hob, pictures 2-4 are the splashback for the range cooker and pictures 5 and 6 just show a small area I did behind the tap.

I hope you agree that the animal tiles look superb and that our choice of colours to compliment them work well.

Thanks once more for all you help in sourcing the tiles, we're so pleased with them.

Regards,

Philip Edwards