- We rented a tile saw from Home Depot. We had everything cut. James went and returned the saw. He returned home and all the tiles were layed out where they were suppose to go. He picked most of them up to start sanding the backerboard - but left the ones down that weren't near his sanding area at the time - and crash. A tile fell to the floor. Luckily, we had some extras and there is a small tile shop up the street that cut a replacement tile. That took up about 3 hours though of swearing, measuring a new tile, calling the tile shop, actually going to the tile shop and coming back.
- When we measured the hole for the stove originally, we left 30 1/4" for the stove ("ideal" for most stoves). 30" is the normal stove width. After taking off the laminate, we laid plywood, then cement board, and then tile. We didn't have the tile when started - so James figured the tile width to be 1/4" - but it was 3/8". Before starting to attach the tile, we realized that our stove would not be fitting in the hole if we chose to continue. So we modified it a bit and sanded down the cement board on both sides. Here's hoping it was enough. This took a good portion of one day.
So where are we at this morning? All of the backsplash is attached to the wall. All except for about 8 pieces of the sides of the countertop are attached. James will throw on the last 8 this morning and we will be able to grout tomorrow. Here's some pictures.
For the most part, it looks pretty good for "do-it-youselfers" - but I guess with it taking 2 weeks, it better look good!
The 30" came out pretty good. I'll let you in with a couple of our secrets to make this backsplash work. On newer houses - it would be easy to throw up this stuff because things are more "accurate" and "not settled" - when your house is 90 years old - things just aren't the way they used to be.
Happily - this 30" area was pretty level and pretty straight - but upon putting up the tiles, we needed about 1/8" - 1/4" more space on top (we started at the bottom to install them). Now if we were "professionals", we would have put the whole height up first and just moved the tiles some to make them work - but then we wouldn't be sure of an even grout line (and if you know James, you know this wouldn't fly). So we put up all but the top row. Now we never worked with glass tile before. We had two options - cut the tiles or sand the cabinets. We have a handheld tile nipper - but it really doesn't give us great results. We tried a Rotozip tip - which provided worse results than the nippers. So James took out his Dremel and started sanding the bottom of the top cabinet. It worked great and provided just enough room to fit that last row of tiles in. Thank goodness. By the way, you can barely see the top row - unless you are bending over and actually looking for it - a whole lot of time spent on something that will barely get seen. That's a lot of what we do.
My job in this whole backsplash thing was to cut the tile sheets (they came 12 X 12) and have them line up as good as possible. I started from all the noticable ends and figured we'd work the corner the best we could. When doing it though, when it came to the end of the window, I had about 1/2" above the ledge there (the individual tiles are just under an inch). And that little inlet of the window was just over 2 1/2 inches. So we hand cut the tiles for the corner there (which came out pretty good - but it was only 10 tiles that needed to be cut). For the edge, we weren't sure what we were going to do since we knew if we cut the tiles, one edge would be jagged. Easy to hide in corners - but not for exposed areas. A quick trip to Lowe's solved this dilemma. We found 1/2" wide, 6" long pieces that matched our tile. We picked up a few of them and ended the tile here with that. That was a blessing.
This long stretch of backsplash also provided some challenges for us. When we installed the cabinets, we made sure they were level. So when we put up all but the top row of tiles on this side, we had about 3/4" left on the portion near the door. But it gradually increased to about 1 1/4" by the time we got to the corner. So full tiles would fit a little past the stove, but we weren't sure how to do the smaller section. The part under the microwave was easy because we didn't have cabinets in our way. James made a trip to the basement and found leftover wood from our cabinet install that was exactly 3/4" wide. So we cut pieces that would fit under two cabinets that filled the gap great. Once those two cabinet areas were filled with wood - the tiles would fit the rest of the way as whole tiles. Great solution!
Here's another picture of our "quick" fix. It's barely noticable and ties in really great. As far as the corner, I was lucky enough to have a whole tile go to the corner on window side wall. Unfortually, for the stove side, we needed about half a tile. Again, we just nipped the 18 tiles needed and put the jagged edge in the corner. The grout should cover up any weird looking cuts - but we cut a bunch of them and picked the best ones. Unless you're actually leaning into our countertops and studing the backsplash, I don't think it will be too noticable.
We spent pretty much a whole day trying to solve these little dilemmas. Maybe that's why this is taking so long. It's fun though. Kind of.
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