tadahouse: The one with the... Kitchen Makeover (Part 4

In Part 3 of the Kitchen Makeover I alluded to another element that we're adding to the kitchen that factored into our choice of chocolate-colored cabinets. What's that you ask? A tile backsplash! Every time I walk down the tile aisle at Home Depot I ooo and ahhh at the glass mosaic tiles and I pet them because they're so pretty! (I think Dave has found me in that aisle petting the shiny tiles more than once!) A tile backsplash was always something that we wanted to add to the kitchen and what better time to do it when you've got the entire kitchen in construction-mode anyway?

When we decided to install the backsplash, I was SO excited to go to Home Depot because this time I was actually going to the tile aisle for realz and I would get to pick out and take home some glass mosaic tile! We looked through all the tiles and picked out a glass mosaic that had blue tones. We only got one so we could take it home to see how it would look in the kitchen. To my delight, when we got to the checkout, the 12 x 12 sheet of glass mosaic tile came out to a whopping $5!!! woohoo! So we took it home and fell in love with it. Fast forward a few days later when we went back to Home Depot to buy more sheets of the same tile... I was only able to find one other 12 x 12 sheet in the same color and design. :( It was sadness all around. A very nice Home Depot associate named Michael even helped me look up and down the aisle, checked their inventory, and other stores in the area for it. Unfortunately Home Depot's inventory system is not very accurate-- even though the system said they had 37 sheets in stock they were no where to be found. We didn't love any of the other tiles in the store... so it was back to the drawing board. :(

I searched far and wide on the web and finally found something that looked similar to the tile we loved on HomeDepot.com!

It had the same blue tones, a little bit of gray, and hints of light turquoise. It's sometimes hard to tell true colors from a picture online, but we took our chances and ordered two boxes! It was perfect!! Just the colors we were looking for and the quality was much better than the original tile that we had found on clearance!! The online picture doesn't do it justice!

We soon realized that picking out the tile and placing the order was by far the easiest part. Cutting and installing the glass mosaic tile is probably one of the more difficult projects we've tackled thus far. Dave did most of the tiling work so I'll let him explain what he did...

The first step was to protect the new cooktop with a plastic sheet.

We rented a tilesaw from Home Depot for about $50 a day. I called around 3 or 4 different places to find out that tilesaws only rent with ceramic tile blades. This meant that we'd have to get a blade that would cut glass tile.

We purchased this diamond blade that's made specifically for cutting glass tile:

I had never used a tilesaw before so the set up was pretty interesting to me. The tile saw came with a pump that we placed in the orange pail and filled with water. This is so that water can be pumped through the hose and sprayed on the blade as it spins to keep the blade cool. The white tray underneath is where all the water is collected.

Home Depot failed to provide us with any form of a drain plug for the white water tray so that water doesn't get all over the floor. To avoid having to go back to Home Depot, I was trying to find something around the house that I could use to plug the hole at the bottom of the tray. I asked Julia whether we had anything that was made of rubber that would work, she suggested one of Pluto's toys. His kong toy was perfect! Pluto was kind enough to lend us his toy for a few days for this project...Thanks Pluto!

I discovered very quickly that sheets of mosaic tile are hard to cut with a tile saw because the little pieces of glass tile are secured together by a mesh backing. After a few tries I figured out that it works better if the tile tray is fed VERY slowly into the blade. Looking back at the project, I might have done better if I pressed a piece of plywood over the top of the tile to keep it pressed firmly against the tray.

Some of the tougher cuts like the three edge cut above require you to hold the piece of tile against the blade and cut it in small segments that chip off. This was required when trying to cut out openings for all the receptacles and switches.

Here is a mosaic sheet with cutouts for both a switch and receptacle partially completed.

After the mosaic sheets were cut, they were staged and ready to go up on the wall:

Once ALL the tile was cut, we moved to the mortar stage. It was important to have all the tile cut first because mortar hardens quickly. The instructions for the Glass Tile Thin-Set Mortar pretty much say "just add water and mix." Sounds easy enough, right?

To help with the mixing, we got a mixer attachment for the drill. I almost burned out my drill doing this so I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a REALLY heavy duty drill. After a minute of mixing with the drill, I ended up just doing it manually with a trowel:

Using the trowel, I spread mortar on the wall and scored with the toothed edge to create that textured look. This helps even out the mortar and better adhere to the tile.

Here is the first section of tile up. I used spacers between the bottom row of tiles and the top of the counter. That space will later be filled with grout.

In some of the more difficult spots such as around receptacles and in areas like this that were enclosed on both ends, the backsplash had to be laid tile by tile rather than sheet by sheet. This meant that we had to cut out each individual piece of tile and place it one by one.

We're getting there! You can also see Julia's awesome job on the cabinets so far! And you can see the new range hood:

And then we got to the window... It required cutting individual pieces of tile to go around the window sill.

After we finished putting up all the tile on the mortar and after waiting 24 hours, we moved on to grouting. With glass tile, we had to use a non-sanded grout. Using a "float" I applied the grout on a 45 degree angle and tried to get the grout in between all the tiles.

When all the tile was up and grouted, I moved onto the power switches and receptacles. Work that needed to be done on the switches and receptacles included: 1) Replacing receptacles near the sink with GFCI for safety; 2) Adding spacers to the receptacles and bring them forward so that they are flush with the tile; 3) Replacing older off-white outlets that just didn't look good now that everything else is updated with white ones. 4) Installing dimmer switches to the main lights in the kitchen and the light above the sink.

(Notice the color difference in the cabinet sheens in this picture below-- this was before we got smart and switched over to the MinWax water-based polyeurathane.)

All done with the switches and receptacles! Tada!

The final step was to caulk the edges. I've learned from past projects that it's best to use tape for straight and clean lines. Also, using your finger and a little water smooths out the caulk nicely.