19 Tips for Installing your Tile Backsplash

welcome to practical home projects we just finished the backsplash installation and i would like to walk through some of the tips we picked up when we were doing the tile install before you even start your project you're going to want to make sure that all the walls you're working with are as flat as possible so we kind of went around the room checked with the level and actually noticed that this section underneath the window had a little bit of an indention where the studs weren't perfectly lined up and rather than just installing our tiles on that you know curved surface which would end up giving us kind of the edges of the tile showing and it just would be not aesthetically very nice we went ahead and just used drywall mud to kind of flatten that surface back out so now hopefully we'll get a nice crisp surface to work on so if you're planning to work around an outlet kind of like we are it's a good idea to just go ahead and turn the circuit off if for any reason you need some of the other outlets on the circuit i like to put tape over the front of it that way you don't mess up the front surface and then also you can wrap black electrical tape around the screws and that'll prevent you if you accidentally are touching it messing with it from electrocuting yourself there's a couple things that to keep in mind when you're working around the electrical boxes so first of all if you are the one to install the electrical box it will make your life a lot easier if you can get an adjustable depth type of box so that way no matter how you install it you can pull it right up to the surface if you were not able to do that and you're kind of in my situation where it's fixed and it's kind of recessed behind the surface just know that nec code 314.20 says that you can have no more than a quarter inch recess behind the finished surface for a non-combustible material like drywall or tile if it's a wood surface it has to be perfectly flush one solution to get around that is use a junction box extender and that'll basically kind of nest inside your junction box and allow it to accommodate that depth both the adhesive and the grout are very sticky substances and they're a little bit difficult to clean off so i like to protect any surface that i want to stay clean so our brand new countertops i'm going to cover it with something durable like cardboard i think just a plain newspaper probably wouldn't be good enough but i've seen people use kind of fabric drop cloths or you know plastic could also work the spacing between your tiles is going to have a major impact on the aesthetic so these are three by six inch tiles so traditionally you could use a 1 8 inch gap you might use a 1 16 inch gap going any bigger than 1 8 inch is probably going to be for bigger tiles like for your flooring so we went with the 1 8 inch gap and we accomplished that by using these 1 16th inch silicone spacers and the tiles actually have built in on them a ridge that gives us an additional 1 16. this specific type of space so you kind of put in on the surface and then you'll pluck them out as soon as the adhesive has cured and then you'll grout over it there's another type of spacer that will be embedded in behind it usually that's only used for bigger spacers for flooring and then you'll actually just grout right over those spacers one of the most important concepts when you're laying out your tiles is to make sure that you don't end up with a really thin slice at the end so what i found out is that if i start on this end with a whole tile by the time i get all the way to the other end there's just a little sliver of tile and that's problematic because it's hard to get it to be perfectly flat and also it could be easily damaged so what i'm doing is i'm going to go ahead and set this first throw out with spacers and everything and then i've got the second row right here behind it so i know that in every case if i have a small piece of a tile on this row i'm going to have a bigger piece of a tile on this row i also know that if i had a small gap up here that means on the other side i'm going to have a small gap at the end of this row so what i'm doing is i'm shifting this whole set of tiles side to side to make sure that this sliver is as big as possible as well as the sliver way down on that end is as big as possible and i do that until they're approximately the same size it's going to be about a third of a tile on the inside corners it's particularly tricky because you're going to have two cut edges kind of butting up against one another so you're going to want to leave a little bit of a gap so make sure that you measure out not only the thickness of a tile but also a little bit of a gap there and then instead of filling that in with grout you're going to fill it in with silicone so it can kind of expand and contract with your house use a sharpie to mark the top of your tile they're easy to write with easy to see and then you can just wipe it right off that surface when you're done we use a tile cutter for most of our straight cuts we found this is a lot easier than using any type of saw and that way it doesn't create a lot of debris this ended up only being 22 dollars to buy so we just went ahead and did that because it was almost the same price just to rent it for a day the tile cutter is not going to work if you need to shave off just a tiny piece or if you need to do more detailed cuts um so if you're not going to be doing this type of project often you probably don't need to invest into a wet tile so because those are several hundred dollars and actually just renting one for the day is about sixty dollars so we ended up using an eight amp angle grinder and then attaching a diamond bit blade and that pretty much did everything we needed using a laser level will really help you get a nice crisp sharp look across your kitchen those are especially important when you're in the corners or if you're going over a gap for example behind your stove the most important thing to do is to line up that first row once your first row is set up then the rest of it will fall into place pretty well assuming that you use those spacers correctly and then when you're lining up that first row if you find you have some high spots and low spots it's a little bit easier to shave the bottom off of some tiles than it is to have a big gap you have to fill in later we use this trowel with one quarter inch depth and one quarter inch wide grooves to apply our adhesive i found the easiest way to cover a big area was to spread it on the wall and then scrape it in a horizontal manner and make sure not to apply any more than you can place tiles on immediately sometimes i'll use the back buttering method for the tiles when i'm going right around an outlet or if it's near the end of the day and i don't want to over apply adhesive by putting it directly on the wall the tiles already have a built-in spacer but that spacer does not continue all the way to the corners so when you're applying your little silicon spacers make sure to tuck those in a little bit away from the edges you definitely want to put two on the bottom so that your level horizontally and on the end it's not a bad idea to put them to even on the short side so that you can make sure that you have even space all the way up when you're doing your fine detail cuts it helps to go about an eighth of an inch wide for example around this electrical box and then you're going to want to be very careful with it i broke a couple of these as i was working so while you're cutting you want to be careful and you want to be careful while you're applying it as well there's a couple things to keep in mind when doing the edge trim so you can use a piece of tile so that makes special edging tile and corner piece tiles for the edge trim and those look really nice but they don't make them for every single type of tile so that's why we went with this sleek metal look they're pretty universal you can match them with just about any type of tile when you're picking out the metal trim be careful to make sure that yours is the right thickness so that roughly matches the thickness of your tile with that adhesive behind it as well as it'll have a little gap next to it and that gap on the trim should match the grout gap that you have with your tiles additionally when you're installing them you'll see that i'm using the mastic and that's going right over that gap in the in the trim and that's the best way to adhere you don't want to use any nails or anything because then it'll get fixed into space and you won't be able to wiggle it around when you're cutting your metal trim you can just use any good metal cutting saw and then be sure to sand off and polish that corner so that it looks nice and smooth so we just installed all this tile last night and then this morning we wanted to use these outlets so i went ahead and started tightening down these outlets just the way they are temporary fix and i broke the tile so i can kind of attribute this mistake to two things that we did incorrectly so the first one is hard to see now i'll kind of pop this broken piece off is that the drywall was not flush all the way to the box so what happened is that even though this had adhesive on it it was not fully supported on the drywall behind it so it's kind of free-floating so we put force on it it broke off the second thing is that this junction box does not come all the way to the surface when i installed it originally i should have accommodated it for the tiles and had it all the way to the surface unfortunately now it's recessed so the only alternative to fix it is to put a junction box extender which will have a little bit of a lip which will kind of rest on top of the tiles and a protect from something like this happening and also b kind of as a safety feature to make sure that no electricity gets out of the junction box i hope these tips were helpful for you guys if any of you done this project yourself and you have anything else to add please leave those in the comment section below i would love to see it and respond to those in the future thanks and have a good one

Channel: Practical Home Projects

Views: 18,894

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Id: OFmlmRiInHs

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 19 2022