A New DIY Project

My husband and I have done several projects around the house. We did all the interior painting in our house. I posted about the bathroom that I painted rectangles all over the walls. When we built the house my husband and I ran all the structured wiring for the entire house. That includes phone, video, network, security, really everything except the electrical. That was an involved project! A couple of years ago we installed a sprinkler system in the yard. Now we've decided to tile the backsplash in our kitchen.

Here are a couple before pictures of the area we are going to tile. There are two areas that we are going to attempt to tile and this is the largest. The metal piece against the wall on top of the cooktop comes off and will be replaced with a flush fitting piece. My pottery will have to find a new home too. There is a bowl and two plates hanging above the cooktop. I hung that just to add a little interest until we did the tile project. We've been planning on doing the tile since we moved in three years ago but are just getting around to it now.

This is the second area. The only problem here will be the two light switches, the phone jack, and the network jack. But otherwise it should be straight forward. I saw that, but we haven't ever done any tiling projects before. We have read several books and checked out things online and are pretty sure that we can handle it. I do have a wet saw from my glass work - so we shouldn't have any problem cutting tile after we purchase a fresh blade. We are planning on starting the tile work over the Thanksgiving weekend. We each have a couple days off so it seems like a good time to start. My husband thinks we can finish completely over that time. I'm guessing that it will take a little longer than that. Most of our projects do!

It did take us a while to decide on tile. We visited several tile show rooms and the choices are staggering. Not only are the choices staggering, but the prices can be too. It was kind of overwhelming walking in and trying to decide on something. It was a little like walking into a yarn shop for the first time.

But here is the tile we decide to get. The main tile will be a 4 inch square yellow tumbled travertine. It is a natural stone so there will be a lot of variation among the tiles. We picked out two molding pieces. The larger one is for a framed out area above the cooktop. The thinner molding piece will be used to edge out the tile on the larger area where the tile meets wall.

We also picked out a glass accent piece that will primarily be used in the framed area above the cooktop, but will also be scattered in the other areas of the backsplash. We are ordering the tile today and it should be here in a week to ten days.

I know this isn't a knitting project, but it is something that will definitely take away some knitting time, so I decided to include the process on the blog. Hopefully you'll find it interesting too.