First Time Tilers

Yep - that was us this weekend!! In an effort to finish up the laundry room, we decided that this weekend would be the weekend we tiled the backsplash.

Only issue is that neither of us had ever tiled before. No problem, right? We'll just YouTube it (I'd say 'famous last words' but in this case, it actually worked!).

The area to be tiled is actually quite small. About 6.5 square feet and lucky enough, those 6.5 square feet are laid out quite conveniently (36 inches across by 24 inches vertically). This meant that we could get away with a 12x12 mosaic without major headaches.

Reminder - here is what we were working with:

Even though it was a bit higher than the norm, I wanted the backsplash to go all the way up to the bottom of the Ikea shelf. It just felt right to me, and I had seen this picture on Pinterest that inspired me:

Source

So next up we took a drive to our favourite tile store, Saltillo Tile Store. We just LOVE this place. We get the best service and they have the best selection of beautiful mosaics there (especially if you are looking for marble). Hubs actually said "let's just go to Saltillo and pick something. Then BUY it." Haha no searching around from store to store!!

We arrived at Saltillo and started looking. I saw some beautiful marble mosaics but Hubs said that he wanted some colour this time. We have whites and greys all over the house already so he wanted to have a bit more fun this time.

Um...kay?

To be fair, we did see some gorgeous coloured tiles:

Of course you all know me, and I was hoping for a beautiful glass penny round:

However, as we learned, a bunch of the tiles we looked at would have numerous cuts and a tile saw was not in the budget. Not for a 6.5 square foot job. I of course thought you could just use those 'tile nippers' but I guess they don't work on glass (or that well on anything other than basic tile).So we had to stick with something that was square - and the right size.

With that limit in mind, we went searching again and hubs picked this:

It is a combo of stainless steel and glass - again, impossible to cut but the sizing was pretty close so we just went for it.

Nice "COLOUR" hubs :-) To be fair, I do think that the black/stainless/glass thing does work with the room and works well with the counter...

Anyhoo - we then picked up supplies from my brother in law (who has everything you could possibly want to do home renos) and grout and mastic from Lowes.

Sunday morning was tile day :-)

Mastic up (you can see some of the lines J drew on the wall to ensure we started with a straight line):

Tile on:

(yes, we were using the wrong tool to spread the mastic but with the faucet etc there, it was too tight to use the normal spreader thingy. We did use it to do the notching though...

And then done!

The spacing was a little bit off on the left side so we kind of cheated and just pulled the cupboard panel away from the wall a bit. The last row of tile slightly goes behind it, but it was better than having a huge gap or finding a tile saw that could cut glass and stainless :-)

It was super fast - whole job took about an hour. I'm sure a pro could have done it even faster but hey - we are beginners!!

Grout is up next :-)