From Manchester to Colorado.

It started at an airport

My first proper tile job, back in 2000, wasn't a bathroom. As I told it on my podcast, Tile Titans: "we were working on Manchester Airport" — terrazzo block work, big commercial floors, acres of the stuff. It's the kind of job that teaches you fast. An airport floor doesn't forgive a wonky line, and neither does the bloke checking your work at the end of the day. Near enough is not good enough. I learned that before I learned much else, and it's never left me.

From the airport I went to Amatino Tiling and spent five years there — an Italian-run firm, old-school craftsmen who treated tiling as a trade with rules, not a weekend hobby. Prep properly. Mind your lines. And never, ever hide a shortcut under grout, because it always comes back — usually at the worst possible moment, and usually in front of the client.

The lad next to me

Here's the part of the story I don't tell often enough. Back in those early years, I worked alongside a lad called Lee Trippier. Same company, same years, same trade. We were two young tilers learning the job the hard way — heavy materials, picky standards, no shortcuts worth taking.

Lee's family now. He's my brother-in-law. And not long ago, the two of us sat down together on a podcast and talked the old days over — more than twenty-six years after we first worked side by side.

There's something strange about that, when you stop and think about it. Two lads start out together in the same trade, in the same corner of England. Then life forks. One of them stays. One of them jumps. I was the one who jumped — and that conversation with Lee is the closest thing my story has to a witness. He was there for the beginning of it. He knows what the work was, what the standards were, and what I was like before America got hold of me. You can't fake that history, and you can't buy it either. It's just there, in the trade, going back to when we were both starting out.

The jump

In my own words from Tile Titans: "2005 I moved to the USA." Just like that. Manchester to America with a trade in my hands and not a lot else. Years later, on the SWIVL Sessions podcast, my advice to anyone standing where I stood was simple: "Don't be afraid to make the jump." I wasn't. Twenty-odd years on, Colorado is home.

The American years weren't a straight line, whatever it looks like from here. Carpentry and deck building first. Then years with a tile contractor. Then remodeling with a house-flipping company — which turned out to be a proper education in how houses over here are built, and how they fail. You see enough other people's shortcuts ripped open, you learn exactly where a house hides its sins. Eventually I went out on my own, and The British Remodeler is what came out the other side.

The rules came with me

Different country, same standards. As I put it on Tile Titans: "stick with the TCNA standards" and "treat every single job as if I'm tiling my own house." That's still the whole quality-control department around here — me, on every job, asking whether I'd accept it in my own home. If the answer's no, it gets redone.

It wasn't always that clean, mind. Early on I made the mistakes every tiler makes, and the confidence only came from going back and correcting them — "I'm doing stuff the right way" is a line from the podcast, and it was earned the slow way. I've also been the one called in when somebody else's shortcut gave up — pull a big wall tile off and find soft mastic behind it that was never going to hold, and you learn what "doing it right" actually costs the client when it's done wrong. I've had work torn out. I've been fired. I'm still here — still correcting the shit I got wrong instead of pretending it never happened. That's not a slogan. That's just the record.

And then, mosaics

A few years ago I stepped back from the trade, then came back to it on my own terms — as I said in 2023, "getting back on track in the trade that I love to do." Coming back, I split the work in two on purpose. The remodeling stayed here. The mosaics went to their own side of the fence — art, murals, pieces made one at a time by hand. That story gets its own diary entry, next one up.

Why split it? Because — Tile Titans again — "creating something different is the way to go forward." Straight tile work, I can do in my sleep. A mosaic is different: you walk into an empty room and you can already see the finished piece on the wall, every colour, exactly how the light's going to hit it. That work tests my brain. Cookie-cutter is everywhere. Hand-made isn't.

The story, whole

So that's it, the full road: Manchester Airport to the foothills of Pikes Peak. Two lads on the same firm at the start of it — one still back home, one tiling bathrooms under a mountain in Colorado, and a podcast conversation a quarter-century later to prove the road was real.

I'll tell the rest of it here, in pieces, the way it actually happened. That's what this diary's for.

— Simon Beames

Quotes are verbatim from my podcast, Tile Titans ("TTL -E1", 2021; "The Outsiders Episode 6", 2023) and SWIVL Sessions ("Lasting Work, Not Fast Fads"). Lee Trippier is my brother-in-law; we worked together 26+ years ago for the same company.

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