Tile Backsplash!

As promised here is the blog about putting in our back splash!

Step 1: Clean off the walls and make sure you have a nice even area. We decided to take down that little molding under the bar to have a nicer continuous back splash. Which lead to the first problem
There was a gap on the dry wall between the counter and the back splash area so we needed these tools:

To put on 2 layers of mud to cover the area before we could sand it down to start on the tile.
Once that was finally done we were able to start with the tile.
First we covered the whole area in this awesome tile adhesive sheets. It's basically a super strong double sided sheet that will hold on to the wall and the tiles instead of using concrete. It's a little pricier than concrete, but it's much cleaner and faster. Once the sheets were cut to side and on the wall it was time to start putting on the tile.
We needed 1/16 inch spacing so we ended up using pennies! As we used glass tiles we got a little hand held tile cutter to cut the tiles we needed to fit around outlets and other areas that a full tile wouldn't fit in.
Then it was time to grout, with a non sanded grout, as sand would stretch the glass.
Now grouting isn't hard but it is messy! We did learn that when it says to do the first wash in 10-20 minutes they mean it! There was a lot going on the first night we started grouting so it didn't get washed on time. The result? Angelique and I worked for 6 hours trying to get the grout out before giving up at 1am to return to it the next morning. Thanks to google and ehow.com we learned the steel wool pot cleaners would do the trick. And it sure did! So if you don't listen to the directions, know there is hope. After the initial wash you need to wait 2 hours then clean off the area again with a cheese cloth.

As we knew that we weren't going to be able to grout the whole thing in one day we left on side of the kitchen to do later in the week. This time we listened to the directions and it only took us 20 minutes to wash the grout out!

But, that wasn't the end of our problems. Turns out that even though the tiles were only 1/8in thick, we couldn't get the light switch covers to go back in. So, we cut the power off to the kitchen, unscrewed the switches and pull the outlets out a little. After putting in new, longer screws we were able to put the covers back on :)

The back splash took a lot longer than we expected, but I LOVE how it turned out! I think it adds a lot to our kitchen.

Here is awesome the finished product :