Adventures in Tiling, Part 1

The Plan: since we were going to be doing a lot of tiling as part of fixing up our house to sell, I wanted to get some practice. My sister, Lillie, wanted to tile the backsplash in her new kitchen. It seemed like that would be great practice for me, so in January, I flew out to Denver to visit Lillie.

For those that don’t know Lillie, let me introduce her, as she will be making frequent appearances. As you may know, my Mom, Dad, brother, and I are all lawyers. Lillie, the baby of the family, is a photographer. While all of us still live in North Carolina, Lillie made her own way. She traveled around the world for a year with her bestie, Amanda, in 2010, at age 23. A few years later, she followed Amanda to Denver, where Amanda was starting graduate school. Both Lillie and Amanda met their future husbands in Denver and Amanda has since moved back to North Carolina. Lillie is still in Denver until we all convince Patrick that they should move to North Carolina.

Lillie and Patrick bought a house last year in Denver. They pretty much gutted the kitchen (redoing the floors, countertops, and cabinets and getting all new appliances), but they were left with an all-white kitchen that was pretty much a blank canvas. My color-loving mother was horrified, saying it looked like a hospital kitchen (she wasn’t wrong…), but we knew that a backsplash would help.

So the plan was that they would pick out and order the tile and I would fly out to help put it up. Did either of us know what we were doing? Not a clue. But we knew we could figure it out. Okay, Lillie actually had her doubts. But I knew we could figure it out.

I found YouTube videos and tutorials from some of my favorite bloggers (How to Install Backsplash Tile from DIY Playbook, How to Install a Subway Tile Kitchen Backsplash from Young House Love and How to Tile a Backsplash from Bower Power, among others) and thought, “we got this.”

Then Lillie sent me a picture of the tile she and Patrick picked out. Apparently I didn’t get a single picture of the tile in person, but this is the tile installed. And here is the link to it.

Gulp. I could feel the doubt creeping in. This was not simple subway tile. This was a super complicated and intricate tile. In hindsight, I don’t know why I was surprised. Lillie and Patrick both are what you would - politely - call “particular”. You could also use other words like super picky, but we’ll stick with particular for now.

Don’t get me wrong, that tile was beautiful. But it was going to be complicated. The tile got delivered a few hours after I flew in to Denver, and once we wrestled the 3 enormous and incredibly heavy boxes of tile inside and opened them, I could immediately see a problem. These tiles are BIG. They are about 9 inches by 10 inches and each tile looks the same, so you can arrange them into different patterns.

But while the kitchen was a good size, the individual spaces we were working with were not. I laid out the tile in one of the spaces we were working with and we realized that the we couldn’t even get one full repeat of the pattern they wanted. Long story short, I didn’t think it was going to work.

Lillie and Patrick talked and eventually agreed. This tile would be awesome in a bigger space, but their kitchen needed a smaller tile, or at least a smaller pattern. The problem then was that it was back to the drawing board. And Lillie had told me that in all of the tile they had looked at, that was the only one they could both agree on. Fantastic.

We spent that evening looking at other options online. They both were drawn to some of the smaller subway tile, but of course, in a decision that would haunt me the rest of the trip, they didn’t want just a basic tile pattern. They liked a herringbone pattern. Awesome.

So the plan was for Lillie and I to go to Floor & Decor bright and early the next morning and text Patrick the tiles we liked for his approval. We obviously needed one that was in stock so we could buy it right away. We looked at so many options, but it was pretty clear pretty quickly that this was the one Lillie wanted.

I had been worried about finding something they both agreed on, but this ended up being the easiest part of the whole weekend. We got the tile and the supplies (by going up to a nice employee, telling her we had no idea what we were doing, and having her pull alllllll of the other materials we would need), settled on a grout color, and we were ready to head back to the house.

Funny story: we texted that above picture to my Mom and told her that is the tile Lillie and Patrick had picked. Mom wrote back and said, “yeah right.” She was sure we were messing with her since we knew that she didn’t like the all-white kitchen. It wasn’t until we texted her a picture of the first sheet of tile up on the wall that she finally realized we weren’t kidding.

Anyway… We had the tile, the mortar, the trowels, the tile saw, grout, grout floats, grout sponges, everything we thought we needed. We only had to turn around twice to go back to the store because I realized either we had forgotten something or I had mismeasured and we didn’t get enough of something else.

But finally, FINALLY, we were ready. And since I am nothing if not wordy and this post has already gotten really long, I’m going to leave you on a cliffhanger. Did we get the f*cking herringbone done? You’ll have to wait to find out.

I mean, yes. Of course we got it done. But you’ll have to wait for me to tell you all about it.

Also, remember how I said the point of all of this was to get practice tiling so I could do some in our own house in order to get it ready to sell? Hah. Lillie got the last laugh on that one. Turns out we are doing zero tiling. But at least she got her damn backsplash.