Back Splash

I just want to preface this post with the fact that we have pretty much the best home teacher we could want right now. He is currently an x-ray technician (I think, or something like unto it) but in a previous life was a carpenter for ten years. Last summer he helped us replace our front door, this summer he crawled into our very cramped, very dirty, very inhospitable crawlspace with me on an unsuccessful search for Angel's ring and over the past month or so he helped us replace our kitchen back splash.

Since I don't have much foresight you get this picture of Lincoln making Valentine's cards two years ago as a before picture of the back splash.

Not a great view of it but you get the idea and you can see how cute Lincoln was. If you can't tell, the back splash is the same as the counter. It wasn't that bad but it was a lot of brown and the cabinets, back splash and counters all seems to blend together. That and it was kind of dark. Actually, the kitchen was pretty dark.

We bought some tiles we liked that were on clearance and put them in the garage to age for about a year and a half (in case you didn't know, you're supposed to age tiles for at least a year before you install them...I'm pretty sure anyway). Our home teacher Brother Bryan knew about the tile and must have been itching to do some tiling because he took the initiative to invite himself over to help me tear our kitchen apart the week before Thanksgiving.

We broke out the circular saw, some hammers and pry bars and shortly after, this was the result:

I was going to post some in-progress pictures but, they're actually quite boring so I'm just going to post some final product pictures that I just took.

Lights on, no under-cabinet lighting.

Lights off, under-cabinet on.

Lights on, under-cabinet on.

We're really happy with the results. The LED under-cabinet lighting I did on my own with LED strips that I cut and soldered and wired and whatnot. It brings the kitchen more like our style and adds a nice accent.

Answers to some possible questions you probably don't have:

Q: Did you lay and space each of those 1" tiles by hand?
A: Don't be ridiculous. They come in 12" sheets already spaced 1/8".

Q: Did you have to cut any tiles?
A: Yes.

Q: Um, how did you do that?
A: Poorly, at first. I tried a small hand grinder and got jagged edges that broke of in crooked ways.

Q: Then what did you do?
A: Well, then I tried a wet tile saw. It was freezing cold and got pretty similar results.

Q: Did you give up?
A: Yes... I mean no. I tried various methods like building a little support guide out of scrap tile to keep the glass from breaking in weird ways with the tile saw. The pieces kept freezing to the concrete (it's December) and the glass tiles still broke all broken like.

Q: So, then you gave up?
A: Yes, I then gave up on the tile saw, which is what I assume you meant by your vague question (you're a terrible interviewer). I bought a little glass cutter and after some trial and error figured out a pretty reliable method using the cutter, some rulers and two pairs of pliers to score and break the tiles one at a time.

Q: How many tiles did you have to individually cut?
A: 87 cut tiles made it onto the wall. Then there were a bunch of other tests and failures.

Q: LEDs are expensive.
A: That's not a question, and they are fairly expensive if you buy them as LED lighting from a hardware or department store. However, if you are willing to do a bit of soldering and already have old ac/dc power supplies from old electronics laying around they're much cheaper. I bought a 16.8' strip of LEDs for about $15.00 on Amazon.

Q: Will you come do that to my kitchen?
A: If you're willing to pay me twice as much as you would a professional and won't complain when you get results half to a quarter as good then, yes, yes I will (and you'll need to pay travel expenses).

(confession: all three of those pictures are with lights and under-cabinet on. The first was taken with a flash, the second with no flash and too fast of a shutter speed and the third with no flash and normal settings. They just happened to all look pretty close to how I described them above.)