Sage – Author at Plaster & Disaster

Welcome to Part 2 of my backsplash tiling recap. In case you missed it, on Monday I shared my prep steps: the tile options I considered, what I ultimately picked out, the supplies I needed, repairing the wall, and getting the wiring for the range hood in place. Today I’ll walk through the actual tiling process from start to finish.

My first step was to unpack, set up, and get to know my new tile saw. I wanted to be sure I knew how to use it before I mixed the thinset and the clock started ticking to get the tile laid. As a reminder, I got a very well-reviewed tile saw from Amazon (affiliate link – read our policies), also available for purchase at Lowes. It’s fairly small, but cuts incredibly smoothly so for small-ish tiles it was exactly what I needed. For larger floor tiles, it would have been a little too small. I unpacked it and set it up on our dining room table on top of a drop cloth, as I had been warned that it sprayed water a bit.

Tiling a kitchen backsplash -- Plaster & Disaster

Yes, I did use an actual watering can to keep the water reservoir filled

Set-up was very quick — I just had to install the blade guard (which keeps the water from spraying you in the face too much). Then I filled the side reservoir with water and gave it a try!

It did make a bit of a mess, but I found that a couple of things helped: 1) I kept the blade guard down as low as it could go, 2) I wore safety goggles (always a good idea), and 3) I put trash bags under the front of the saw and then draped them down over the side of the table and straight into a bucket so that any runoff would be channeled into the bucket. It worked well, and the little bit of mess to clean up in the dining room was totally worth it to have the saw upstairs near where I was working rather than downstairs in the basement.

With the saw operational, it was time to mix the thinset! My big tip is to ignore the instructions on the bag (which are focused on mixing an entire bag, in our case 50 pounds which would be way too much and then it would dry and you would have a bucket of dried thinset to deal with…just trust me). Instead, follow this video to mix a bit at a time to the right consistency (about the thickness of pancake batter).

The other mistake I made was that I should have bought white thinset because I was using white grout — a few times it squeezed out through the spaces a lot and then I had to scrape it away during the grouting process and it was annoying. But I persevered!

Next I pulled up a photo of the 45-degree herringbone pattern I was using, and started tiling! Here’s a reminder of the pattern I was working with:

via Country Living

I started at the edge of the counter to the left of the stove lined up with the edge of the cabinet so that when it came time to do the full wall behind the stove I would have whole tiles running alongside the cabinets. I used the trowel to apply the thinset to the wall in patches and then score it, and then started placing the tile. The pattern ended up being incredibly easy to follow — I got the hang of it within the first few repeats.

It was somewhat slow going to cut the pieces needed to work around the outlet, counters, and cabinets, but steady and relatively easy.

Once I finished the wall to the left of the stove, I got to work tiling behind the stove. It was a bit challenging to reach back there, but I moved the stove out about halfway and was able to reach behind it. The one thing that made it easier was back-buttering the tiles, ie spreading thinset directly onto the back of each tile and then scoring it with the trowel rather than trying to spread it directly onto the wall from my awkward angle. With this technique I made my way across the back behind the stove. You can see where the new tile met old, since I chose not to demo the complete tile wall given that the bottom portion is totally hidden behind the stove.

Tiling the wall above the stove went relatively quickly as it was a big stretch without a lot of cuts to make.

The one part that was challenging was that my spacing resulted in a tiny empty sliver along the right side of the cabinets. It was hard to fill in with thin pieces because there just wasn’t enough surface area on them to get a solid contact with the wall. I managed to get a few in place, but not all:

I decided that rather than fighting with them more, I would use quarter round to cover up this thin sliver on each side once I was done.

As you may remember from Monday’s prep post, I decided to use metal trim rather than tile trim pieces. This was mostly a financial decision (trim pieces can be pricey), but also I liked the look of the metal edging. I used my miter saw to cut mitered corners (but my tile saw would have worked too), and then used thinset to adhere the trim in place when I was ready for it.

Then I just tiled right up to the edge of the metal trim, knowing that once I grouted I would get a pretty smooth look along the edges.

The portion along the sink went quickly, and I decided to stop at the end of the pass-through rather than go back up the wall on the opposite end of the counter since I wanted the tile to draw the eye to the back of the room rather than have the column competing for attention. I knew the stopping point would be much less noticeable once everything was grouted and the tile faded into the background a bit more.

All told it took me about 9 hours to do the tiling spread out across 2 days and about 30 minutes to clean up at the end of each day (it would have been more efficient to get it done on a single day, but I had early evening commitments both days, like going over to Naomi’s parents’ house to watch us appear on reality TV).

I liked the tile already, but knew from past experience that grouting would make a big difference too. I tackled the tiling on a Saturday and Sunday, and then Monday after work came home to do the grouting. It took a few hours and some upper body strength, but wasn’t too hard.

First I mixed the grout following these instructions. You are aiming for a peanut butter-like texture. Then I used the rubber grout float to push grout into each of the grout lines:

That’s when I started having a panic attack because the grout was a lot darker and tanner than I wanted — much less “white” than my tiles. I tried to tell myself it would be okay and persevered, removing the excess grout with a wet sponge once I had finished grouting all the lines. With my arms aching I called it a night and hoped that when I woke up in the morning the grout would have dried lighter.

Fortunately I was rewarded when morning came with lovely white grout lines. A huge sigh of relief ensued.

And the edges along the metal trim looked nice and clean with the grout in place:

The final two steps were to remove the grout haze with a dry clean cloth and then caulk along the counters and cabinets to go from this:

To this:

(I also painted the underside of the cabinets because I realized the unpainted bottoms were driving me crazy.)

I also still had to add trim to cover up the small gap along the edge of the cabinets above the stove:

Fortunately quarter round fit perfectly against the (still to-be-painted) crown molding at the top of the cabinets:

And that’s it, the full process of tiling the backsplash! Including the tile saw it cost me $194, and it took me a three-day holiday weekend and then two evenings after work to prep, tile, grout, and caulk. I’m so thrilled with the final result! (photo below from before I added the quarter round….)

And for $200, it’s a big improvement over where we started!

Next up I’ll share how I worked up the courage to drill into my lovely new backsplash to mount our range hood!

Happy Monday! I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving! Sam and I were in North Carolina visiting his mom and stepdad who relocated there this summer, and Naomi and Brad celebrated with family in Massachusetts. It was nice to see a new part of the country, enjoy the warmer weather, and see Sam’s mom, stepdad, brother, and sister (of course I see his sister all the time because we still work together!).

In any case, we got back late Saturday night, and then Sunday diligently got some work done in the kitchen. I know I have a ton to catch you up on, so today I thought I would start the how-to of the backsplash project since you saw it in my post about painting the cabinets last week but I didn’t dive into the details. Today I’ll share about the options I considered and the prep steps, and then Wednesday I’ll give the full tiling blow-by-blow.

I’ve basically spent the entire 11 months that we’ve been working on the kitchen (so far) trying to figure out what to do for the backsplash. I was torn between a few approaches: simple subway tile (easy, low cast, and fairly neutral), something a little more exciting like marble (feels a little more special, but still relatively neutral), or something bold and exciting like patterned tiles.

With relatively neutral walls, cabinets, and counters, I was drawn to the idea of something colorful and unique on the backsplash. I mean, look at these:

via Wall Street Journal | Walker Zanger | New Ravenna | Mirth Studio

To be honest, if cost hadn’t been a factor I might have gone this direction. But these tiles were all like $30/square foot + (even the Mirth Studio tiles above — which are actually wood — very cool! — are $28 each for a 12″x12″ tile…), which is just more than I felt able to spend at this stage of the project (especially after the unexpected floor and dishwasher expenses). I also did worry that it would be a little too loud/busy, and since this isn’t our forever home I do want it to be something that doesn’t totally scare off future buyers. Instead, I think adding color through accessories and other less significant structural elements is the way to go.

Still, I wasn’t ready to give up on the idea of something a little special, so marble also caught my attention. Just look at this beautiful backsplash (and counter) from Sarah Sherman Samuel:

Source: Stories

But marble would also have been costly, higher maintenance than I’d like in my kitchen, and I worried that it felt a little upscale for the true vibe of our house…there’s only so fancy you can be with 7′ ceilings.

So that brought me back to plain old subway tile. Everyone has it. But everyone has it for a reason: it’s affordable and neutral, so it makes a great choice if your backsplash is not going to be the star of the show/budget. Still, I wanted my kitchen to feel just a little special, even if subtley — so I decided to do a less popular pattern, the “45-degree herringbone.” You can see it pictured last in this lineup of different tile patterns:

via Country Living

I really don’t like 90-degree herringbone, popular as it is. But the 45-degree herringbone really appealed to me because it feels much more modern and “architectural” — I know that’s a strange way to describe it, but for some reason it makes me think of Frank Lloyd Wright, who I absolutely love. You can see it especially well when it’s done with dark grout, like this bathroom also by Sarah Sherman Samuels:

Source: Stories

But I knew that for my kitchen, white grout was the way to go to keep the pattern more subtle. (Bonus: white grout also minimizes the visibility of slight variations in tile spacing….)

In terms of tile, I hunted around and finally found this tile from Lowes:

They are sold by the piece for $.22 each, and at 3″x6″ each that comes to $1.76/square foot. What a steal! Plus they are “self spacing” which means I didn’t need to buy spacers too. They are much whiter than some of the “white” subway tiles I came across in my search, and they look good against our white counters (I took a counter remnant to the store with me to compare, but you could also bring home a tile sample if you can’t bring your counter to the store — well worth the time before you buy everything and start tiling).

I did have one awkward encounter in the store when I cut myself on some sharp tile:

But fortunately I carry bandaids in my purse at all times.

Here’s the full list of supplies I needed:

300 subway tiles (I ended up with 68 left over, which I was able to return after settting aside 4 in case I need to replace any down the road) — $52 (I knew I needed somewhere between 30 – 35 square feet…at one point I measured it out perfectly and wrote it down in my kitchen planning excel file, and then the changes got erased and rather than re-measure I just decided to err on the top end and plan for some waste because of cuts)
Aluminum tile trim (to use instead of trim pieces) — $18
Thinset mortar — $13
Unsanded grout, white — $9
Grout float — $5
Grout sponge — $2
Trowel — already had from previous tiling project
Bucket — already had
Joint compound to repair wall — already had
Drywall knife to repair wall — $9
Tile saw — I found a very well-reviewed one from Lowes, but ordered it from Amazon for $85 (affiliate link – read our policies)

Total cost: $194

Before I could start tiling, I needed to do some prep work on the space. I’d removed the previous backsplash in October, but that left some minor damage in the drywall plus a fair amount of leftover thinset.

You can’t tile over such an uneven surface, so my first step was to use my DeWalt multi-tool to remove the thinset as much as I could:

The wall was still pretty beat up and uneven, though, so I used joint compound and a drywall knife to skim coat the entire thing:

Once it had dried, I sanded it down and was left with a fairly smooth work surface at last. I’m not going to give a tutorial on this particular step because I don’t think I’m an example of good skim coating technique. In fact, I know I’m not. But here’s a better tutorial from Toolbox Divas if you need one!

I also needed to move the wiring for the range hood. It was installed very off-center for the outlet that the microwave had been plugged into:

It had been inside the cabinet that was there so it didn’t matter that it was off to the side, but I knew that it needed to be centered so that it would be hidden behind the new range hood I planned to install. Moving it was a highly technical process. First I switched off the electricity to that circuit, then I drilled a new hole in the middle of the wall, then I used a difficult and unwieldy series of coat hangers to move the wires to the new hole. I taped one coat hanger to the end of the wires to push them back into the wall (coat hanger taped on so I wouldn’t risk losing the wires in the wall), then used another coat hanger to reach through the new hole and hook on to the wires and pull them through. I did all this while wearing my headlamp to see into the hole and standing on the top of the counters/stove, hence the lack of photos…. There was a lot of cursing and sweating, but it actually worked!