Tiling the Backsplash

Forgive me, blog followers, for I have lapsed.  It has been a million years since my last post.

I know the whole blog thing only works if you post regularly and all that, but we've had some bumps in the road lately.  Nothing big, just that it took us awhile to get our courage up to permanently affix porcelain tiles to our walls and then Drew took my computer and camera overseas with him (goodbye photographic evidence!) and then several thousand items on the ol' to-do list overtook our lives.  We'll blame the nesting instinct, which seems to express itself as "stuff Drew needs to do RIGHT NOW" in our house.  

At any rate, the backsplash is tiled, grouted, and sealed.  It's not caulked around the edges (that's still on the to-do list) but you can get the gist.  If you'll remember, when we last left off with this project, our walls looked like this (but with a faucet):

and this (but with a countertop to the left of the stove): 

We lived like that for awhile, and then we decided that splattering spaghetti sauce and dishwater and other miscellaneous kitchen substances on bare plaster was probably not a good long-term thing to do.  So we got 'er done.

We used pre-mixed mastic, which was recommended to us by the fine folks over at Home Depot.  It was incredibly easy to work with - just dip the trowel into the goop, smear it on the wall, and stick the tiles up.  No mixing and no powder everywhere.  In the photo below, you can see that the trowel makes ridges in the mastic as you spread it on the wall.  This ensures that there is a "just right" layer of mastic on the wall to hold the tiles up but not squish out everywhere.  Brilliant.

And then came the tiles.  We started the pattern in the lower left hand corner and stair-stepped across, being sure each row stayed level.  Initially, we were using spacers in between all the tiles but then we realized that we had inadvertently purchased "self-spacing" tiles.  Things moved a lot faster after we figured that out!

Drew was in charge of tiling and I was in charge of cutting, which worked out well.  My first set of cuts was simple - I just had to snap a bunch of tiles in half to butt up against the door frame to get the pattern going correctly.  You can see the fruits of my labor sitting in the counter in the photo above.  My tools were rather unorthodox, but they did the job:

Here's what I used -

1. Tile snipper.  First you score the tile with a sharp little wheel and then you clamp the tile and snap it along your score line.

2. Teach for America Magazine to use as a guide for the sharp little wheel, which has a mind of its own without something to rest against.

3. Some other magazine to use under the tile as I was scoring.  Our poor kitchen table has a few scars from before I realized that I needed a barrier.

4. Chanel lip pencil to mark the tiles.  This pencil was a free sample approximately 10 years ago.  Since that point, it has become abundantly clear that I'm not a lip pencil kind of gal.  We didn't have a grease pencil or something more properly suited to the task, and I didn't want to use a sharpie or anything permanent, so Chanel has been sacrificed to the cause.  Sorry, Coco.

Though my snipping technique quickly became pretty good, we eventually faced the fact that we needed to make some finicky cuts to get around the outlets.  The snipper is only good for cuts that travel all the way across the tile.  It doesn't do corners or anything, which we clearly needed (see below).  We could have gone the lazy route, like some previous occupant did with the shower tiles, and cut up a bunch of squares to piece together around the outlet.  We're not lame like that, however, and we really wanted to do this right.

I taped off the cuts I thought we would need to make (the blue tape is the part of the tile that needs to go away) and we headed to the hardware store.

Please permit me one paragraph to gush about our hardware store.  It's "in town" in our little neighborhood and is owned and staffed by a bunch of twenty-something dudes.  I say "dudes," because they seem to be perpetually hung over.  Nevertheless, they are awesome at figuring out the exact tool you need for any job under the sun.  Also, one time we walked in and Madonna was playing.  LOVE.



They sent us home with a hacksaw blade that looks like a string covered in sand paper.  It took both of us to use (one to hold the tile and one to saw) but it worked like a charm! 

Here's Drew carefully placing our cut tiles around the outlet: 

Ta-da! We turned out to be awesome at this part.  Go team.

The whole giant wall behind the sink took approximately two hours to tile (and would have taken less if we hadn't been using spacers and if we hadn't needed a trip to the hardware store).  The other wall took about the same amount of time because there were THREE outlets that needed careful cuts.  Lucky for us, we had our super hacksaw blade and it was a piece of cake.

Here's the pre-grout photo of the other side (no spacers!).  Before you ask how we got the bottom row to stay up behind the stove with nothing to support it, I'll tell you our secret: Fervent hope plus waiting to pile the rest of the rows on top for a little while.  Luckily, nothing slid down the wall because I'm not sure what we would have done.

Forty-eight hours after tiling, it was time to grout.  Having learned our lesson about powdered grout while regrouting the bathroom last year, we headed straight for the pre-mixed stuff.  A note on color: After asking Drew a million times what color the grout should be, conducting a poll on this very blog, and receiving lots of input from blog readers near and far, Drew decided that he strongly preferred white grout.  I was still undecided, so white seemed like as good a choice as any.

Using the pre-mixed stuff involved dipping the tile float into the bucket of grout, smearing it into the cracks, and getting as much of the grout off the tile faces as possible, like so:

(Once again, I apologize for the terrible quality of these photos.  We need to pull ourselves together on that front.)

Three (?) hours later, we used a wet sponge to clean the rest of the grout off the tiles and to smooth out the grout left in the spaces between the tiles.  Several days later, we sealed the grout so that it wouldn't soak up whatever we send flying at it.

Then we had a choice to make.  Initially we stopped the tiles above the sink right before we would need to make any cuts to get around the door molding (this is a pre-grout photo):

That looked sort of unfinished to me and I wasn't sure it would be high enough to evenly space the open shelving and not look funny.  So we added one more row, and I think it looks much better now.

Here are the "after" photos:

You can see that we still need to caulk where the tile meets the cabinets on top and where the tile meets the countertop on the bottom.  You don't get a wider shot of the area near the stove because the counter has stuff on it from breakfast, which has not been cleaned up yet (don't judge).

Above near the sink, we need to caulk the tile-doorframe space, tile-countertop space, and tile-wall space (off to the right).  Please note the additional row of tile on top, which I think is more aesthetically pleasing than the photo above.  We will put one open shelf approximately four rows of tile from the top and the other one approximately 8.5 rows from the top, leaving a 20 inch clearance between the counter and the bottom shelf.  

We're getting there!  Updates on open shelving, progress (or lack thereof) on the nursery, and other miscellaneous baby preparation items (like totally rearranging our bedroom) to come!