Tiling the Kitchen

We have needed to tile the "backsplash" of our kitchen for awhile. Our walls are dry wall finished with clay plaster.

Clay plaster is not water proof unless you seal it and we didn't, thinking that we would be tiling much sooner than we did. And the wall behind the sink fixtures was experiencing some serious water damage.

One day I found a tiny little seedling growing out from the crack in the drywall.

I'm not kidding.

A good friend, Cheryl, gifted us with these leftover pieces from her kitchen remodel. There were only four (or five?), so we needed to find something else to fill up the entire section of our backsplash.

We ruminated on this for awhile, but knew that we would need more tile. Eventually we ended up at the ReStore, which is where we also bought our kitchen cupboards. It feels so good to use someone else's cast-aways and left-overs.

Seriously.

For $50 we got this:

A variety of colors with beautiful variegations. We used the initial tiles that we got from Cheryl and matched larger tiles to those colors.

I was pretty happy with what we were able to find.

Initially, we thought we would mount the littlest squares (from Cheryl) in a strip 3-squares wide and run that straight around the wall about halfway between the counter and the upper cupboards.

But because we have so many outlets and light switches along that wall, I was concerned that it would look too chopped-up.

Then one day I had the idea to cut the larger tiles that we bought from ReStore into squares and rectangles of two different sizes and arrange them in a random pattern.

We used some larger tiles that we bought behind the stove, framed with the smaller squares and some smaller rectangle pieces.

We're pretty happy with the finished product.

 We are planning to put a trash cupboard with a granite countertop here:

 And an open cupboard for cutting boards here:

As an added bonus, while the work was being done, HE sanded and sealed our existing wooden countertop and added a sprayer to the kitchen sink (yay!). So everything looks shiny and new again.


And I can squirt people across the room.