Learn how to tile as a DIYer Anyone can do this!

hey it's Jeff from home renovation DIY here again and today we are tackling a really cool project in my new kitchen in a really old house so it's an 1880 farmhouse we're doing the backsplash but we're not just doing a backsplash you'll notice this wall has no upper cabinets we're going open-concept with the back wall we're doing a huge hood fan here some really massive build-out wooden trims with sills on the windows it's gonna look really spectacular and we have an awesome detail we've got some big white pencil tile I'll show you what that is in a minute we're gonna frame in a box here to really highlight the area around the stove we've got a mix fuel stove for the dials on front so there's no back on it so that gives us a space here between the hood fan and the stove to really dress it up a little bit and we got a great plan to do that with the same wall tile in a different pattern alright so we're gonna do all the math and show you how to get this organized soon exactly where to start today we are covering all the tools we're going to need and we're gonna need a lot of them because we're got a lot of different cutting things going on I need a different cutter I need my grinder I got a wet saw set up I've got my tile snips we're gonna need every trick I got in the book to get this done but if you want to have a designer tile job in your home and do it yourself watch this video we're gonna show you how to do it so first of all let's talk about preparation because your walls their walls nothing really special there whether they're painted or not or the muds finished or not it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference so don't get too worked up over it but preparation is your issue you want to have the right materials on-site before you start measure your area that you're tiling get an extra 10 that even 20% almost every store in the world will let you take tile back if you don't need it right so it's better to have it on site in case of an accident or in case you open a box and you find an entire stack of broken corners trust me it happens be prepared have extra stuff available next thing you need is your supplies right we're talking about your trowels and your adhesive now when you're doing a kitchen wall if you don't have a sink in the area it's not considered a wet area you can use an adhesive in most cases every backsplash is done with an adhesive even if there's a sink there if you're concerned about it you can use a modified or even a non modified cement in that application and you're gonna be just fine now today we're using type 1 adhesive it's got a really great bond so what holds tiles in place I've also got my spacers and here's the math a little trick for you for the tile world take your tiles and lay them up okay because it might say 4 by 12 but it's not actually 4 inches measure the gap from your counter to your ceiling and then buy this spacer that allows you to finish off with a full tile that's it it might be 1/16 it might be 1/8 there might be a 360 but if you do that you won't have cuts at the counter or the ceiling now in this old farmhouse the counters are level I installed these cabinets with the laser level my ceiling way out of no way after 140 years my ceiling on this old house is gonna be anywhere near level so we're gonna have a lot of custom cutting to follow the detail of the structure at the ceiling the goal is to have enough wow and pop and pizzazz on the wall and enough lights in the ceiling no one's really going to be staring at it and making that an issue if you gotta choose put your cuts at the ceiling but if you can avoid it by the right spacers ok now I need a roll of garbage bags this is my protection from encounters I'm gonna roll that out and do all my work on top of that so when I'm done I can fold it all out and rid of my gooey mess nice I need a pail with a sponge now this is just a basic tile sponge you can get it anywhere we also need some wedges no these are because when you install tile on a counter you want to keep them off the counter just a little bit of a space now I'm talking 1/32 of an inch is all it takes because if you ever want to change your counter you can unscrew it slide them out put a brand new one right back in where it was some awesome ways that you can maintain your house without having issues plus there is a rule in the tile world whenever you're changing planer materials you need an expansion joint this little spacer gives you that joint in case you need it alright so in the wintertime when the wall starts to freeze on the outside and it starts to bow outwards a little bit I'm not gonna have an issue it's not gonna be attached to my counter it's just gonna be sitting close to it with a silicone expansion joint perfect same thing for both ends okay leave a little gap all the way around and make sure that you have room for things to grow and expand now we also going to be using my continuous rim diamond cutting wheel this is for porcelain it's going to cut through the ceramic like butter all right probably some safety glasses scratch tool the nips in case I need any fine details around my plugs I've got a measuring tape knife a marker whenever you're installing glazed tile use black marker your pencil isn't gonna work bottom line you can wipe this off after you made your cut and I'm also using a nice travel here because it's adhesive it's a small groove it's more like a quarter by quarter so what you're looking for I'm cheating and I'm using my scooter travel today don't forget a nice roll of tape can be handy for covering of protecting edges and taping down your plastic and safety glasses are pretty important in this kind of scenario every once in a while I know I'm a safety second kind of guy but sometimes it's just necessary now the only other thing that you're gonna need I highly recommend is the laser level hmm if you have a laser level you can make one line and put your first row tile on perfect and then build from there it saves you so much time and energy there's nothing worse than when you're working around huge windows like this then when you get to the top and the tiles on one side are higher than the tiles on the other trust me having a laser light level is going to change your renovation life now let's get over and take a look at the pattern so you'll understand the math and how we're going to lay this out because you can't just start in a corner on a kitchen like this you got to start with the thing that gets the most attention and that's gonna be this pattern right here so I got really lucky and I managed to find some ceramic pencils that are the same size as the tile that I'm using really cool it's so close it's not even funny so what I did is I laid out my tile we're building the wall in a brick pattern but the dimension is basically three tiles wide which is three feet and then six tiles high which is two feet because it's a 4 by 12 and I'm just laid out my pencils to get an idea what's going on and what I want to do because I want to miter the joint on the pencils on my wet saw so that I can have this picture framed so if you can imagine full tiles across the bottom brick pattern up the side full tile across the top now I know because I've laid this pattern out I'm working inside the dimension of the finished tile that's the key and in here all I'm gonna do is change the way I'm putting in the tile I'm gonna throw in boom a little bit of herringbone action okay and then all the cuts to go with it but we're going to build all this inside the confines of three full tile wide by six tiles high that enables us to have a clean perfect finished look without any slivers it's a great way to add an accent this kind of situation you're only gonna throw a little bit of square footage in the garbage but ceramic tiles are relatively inexpensive if you try to find a mosaic or something for in here you can be paying up to $60 a square foot and that can be a little bit ridiculous it also will date your install where a basic ceramic that looks like a natural stone is timeless so this is a brilliant idea so for years to come it'll look brand-new and the reason I'm showing you to start in the middle is because in this situation we have a very symmetrical room I have a middle of the wall I have two big windows I've got a hood fan I've got a stove I've got detail I can't afford for anything to even be a quarter inch out or there's gonna be a line somewhere sooner or later that screams hey he started on the left-hand side now if you have just a great big wall okay like under your cabinets or something and you want to start on the left and work left to right I get it I've done this thousands of times and just leave your cuts in the inside corner and then you can start over here work your way back and leave your cuts in the inside corner not a big deal but in a situation like that you want to map this area more like it's a showroom it's a showpiece it's a work of art right so what we want to do is get our center line boom our measurements 36 and a quarter that's 18 underneath okay I've already got the center line here from when I installed the countertops if you want to see that video just click the link right here now what we want to do put our laser line on the center line very important I mean they're all right I've got Center lines all over the place here glad I'm consistent now what we want to do is we want to measure off one of our tiles and use our marker to put the center line on that tile remember our piece that goes in the middle was three tiles wide so our center line is the middle of the first time so take our measurement here 11 and 1/2 so that is 5 and 3/4 okay so there is my mark no now my tile I have I can put it on the wall and put that mark right on that laser line and I know I'm in position from left to right top to bottom I've dropped my laser line right here check this out okay I'm gonna build all of my tile right there so the laser is just above the tile okay and I'm gonna use my wedges to set the tiles at the perfect height because there's a slight variation here it's not always perfect and you'll notice all of my plugs were also installed with a laser level so they're all at the same height so the finished trim covers the grout line my plan is to make sure that when I'm done that grout line all the way across the whole kitchen every single plug finishes in exactly the same location now I've got an option because the set screw on these plugs has a little bit 3/16 of an adjustment so what I did is I screwed all these plugs in at the lowest possible point checking them with a laser line making sure that my cover is gonna cover over my grout line or in every case and then I can get them out of the way because I don't need them anymore in a lot of cases and a lot of cases when I'm all finished I'm going to be wiring these plugs I'm gonna need a longer screw I put them in here just so that I can double check my work but my setup and reinstall and help me formulate a plan in my brain that I could visually see was gonna work out you can see that the electrical boxes I used the mounting screws actually inside the rectangular of the box okay and so the the plate here actually extends past where I cut the drywall so when I'm installing my tile as long as I come up to the edge of that cut drywall I'm gonna be fine and then watch this people ask me don't you have to cut around the screw to detail not if you buy these plates this is a snap-on okay and that's it no screws necessary okay so what we're gonna do is we're going to tile first then I'm gonna wire all the plugs and then we're gonna snap on on the covers and it's gonna be as simple as just cutting rectangles and I don't have to worry about the detail with the grinder of cutting around the screw holes and risking having one of my cups a little bit too big it simplifies the install it makes everything a lot easier it's a quick checklist let's make sure we got this straight we've got our center line we've got our plan for our design we have our horizontal line we've got our wedges and our spacers we're ready to put adhesive on the wall and start attaching our tile first we want to protect the new countertop so we just installed and this is my favorite system for doing it because this is actually three mil plastic and as a garbage bag it's six mil which is really super thick okay then I can lay this down and if I want to I can throw a little bit of tape on the edge just so that I can maintain the integrity of the area that I'm working in and I'm not gonna cause damage to my new countertops okay once I get all my plastic tape down we'll start putting so we're ready to get started we're gonna use the wet saw for the half and half cuts remember when you when you're putting in a tile on a brick pattern and you can you cut it in half if you use a scratch tool it's actually too long so if you use a wet saw then the blade of that saw takes away the material and then what's left over is exactly the right fit when you're adding that grout line to the dimension that was confusing we'll show you what we mean when we start building it take those in half please thank you now just another quick note because we're using an IKEA kitchen we're gonna be adding this panel on the side cable of every end of the cabinet so I'm not just bringing tile across the back I'm actually tiling all the wall behind the stove and fridge it's really beneficial helping keep things clean long term and in the case of the fridge the fridge isn't quite as big as the space so it's nice to have that detail finished off so no matter which angle you're looking at your kitchen people aren't seeing a painted wall behind so when we're done the tile will cut the panel to fit right up to the wall which is about here so now I know when I'm working I can slide my tile in behind nice and quick and last of course open the pail yeah if you just take the knife to get this started here generally this is like a release strip and then you just peel it back you could use a pail opener but these big cans are not as hard as the little ones once you get them started they just generally give up the ghost no problem at all so I'm gonna just rescue all of this adhesive on the lid and get that on my wall okay here we go no we're gonna start off with the tile right up to the red line we're gonna do a good chunk of this wall behind where the stove is just to make our life easier now in the world of tiling of course there's all these rules from the tile Association as far as a proper tile installation this is not a wet area so 85% of coverage is good and realistically what that means there's you have directional troweling you set your tile on and you slide it contrary to the groove to flatten it out and you'll get really good adhesion right you don't have to travel it on in the same direction you just have to finish with directional traveling okay go I have my laser installed so I'm gonna go like this I'm gonna slide that up until my laser line is right above my tile and my centerline is there okay that's perfect now just the process of sliding it into place gets me the good bond so out of curiosity we're gonna double check all right and it's not perfect right but that's fine that's the point of an 85 percent adhesion we don't have to worry about perfection just close trust me a new home construction your adhesion rate is gonna be somewhere around 50 percent if you're lucky they move way too fast to worry about whether or not every tile has got perfect bonding all right so there may be a tile standard but an industry standard is so much lower and it's not even worth having that discussion pure DIY er you are going to make sure that every one of the tiles that you put on is firmly in place and that really is the goal one more thing you want to know about a lot of these glassy tiles come in a stack with the back to the front back to the front and they have wax now in this case this little waxy substance here it looks like a sprayed on ring you can see that all right that's just there to protect the tile if you can remove all that before you install it it's helpful okay because there we go installing a clean tile means that when you go to grout you know you have a clean wall if you don't clean it before you might forget it until later and then it'll get in the grout lines and mess everything up for the sake of getting our lines started we're gonna mark 5 and 3/4 that's our center line that's our grout line that's all we have to do to establish our brick pattern ok you see that right there the other thing is this tile should be on the side of the laser let the laser be basically the grout line in this case okay this makes life really simple and you can stick it on and then collapse the ridges to the left and then slide it back in place to make sure you got a good bond that's really all you gotta do here we go here we go you can almost give a full time job just some kid take this wax off for you while you go no you don't want to do that now here we have our spacers we're using 1/8 and what we want to do just for consistency is we want to start with the grout lines with the spacers okay we're generally only using it to determine the height of the tile to the ceiling keeping these grout lines consistent but if you do a lot of tiling generally you can just go by eye but if you're new to this and having the spacers has a huge benefit to keeping everything consistent so that when you grow it you don't have to worry about over grouting and then cleaning up grout to adjust your lines it's just so much nicer now in this situation we actually set the depth of the counter so that the tile goes in behind which is cool but it's not going to go behind the metal bracket on an IKEA kitchen so we are going to measure from the cabinet just a little bit wide of our grout line and then we use the scratch tool to cut that way okay we're gonna slide this tile in place here now okay you don't know same thing every time you start another row mark here five of the 3/4 for your centerline stall it to the side and then collapse your ridges with pressure set your grout line depth bam one of the best things about this adhesive is that it holds the weight of the tile in position so this isn't gonna be sliding around don't try to cheap out and save money by buying the cheap adhesive it doesn't have that holding strength okay and there are different options especially to go to the box store and what I'm talking about you'll have a little mini tub for $20 and then a mini tub for $30 when it comes to tile supplies you get what you pay for so don't be afraid to spend a little bit extra it's trying to do work like this going from top building down it is really frustrating if it doesn't hold the way to the tile okay finish everything in the same direction here we go [Music] that sounded terrible whatever okay so now we're gonna be setting the bottom row we want it to have that perfect level we're using wedges so this situation I'm gonna maybe suggest especially if you have plugs you have to cut around get your tiles ready and then travel the tile instead okay now just on the word of advice if you're doing this when you're traveling if you hold the trowel too flat when we do it you won't leave much adhesive on there stand the trowel almost straight up because that's the dimension of the hole okay all right here we go now just run your finger along the edge real quick get rid of the extra okay collapse the ridges set the height and then as an extra bonus you can always put a wedge right in there okay Josh to help make sure you know if you're using the good adhesive like this you won't need the wedge but I wanted to demonstrate that so you all know what I'm doing so it turns out we're math is really lousy on my half tile I had Matthew cut a bunch of these I wasn't under center i Adam measured about 5 and 3/4 for the center line that's obviously wrong so double-checked 5 and 7/8 man oh man oh man good reason if you're gonna do something like that cut one tile double check and then go back and figure out how to do math again here you go never glad I didn't get to do 20 rows in your detail now here's the best part about this job the wall isn't straight and their contact is lousy because it's a pencil and just filling up the backside of it now to make sure I'm gonna guarantee my contact on this curveball it's always easier to squeeze in a little bit extra and do not have enough make sure we got expansion contraction or setup around yours I was expanding contract oh yes now the good news is is that near a stove when it gets hot it actually gets smaller the tile expands what it's cold so generally you're not gonna have shear causing growth during the cooking time causing things to break off the wall but the power goes out things are gonna get a little bit cold around here there we go just set that in place with your square okay so here we go and that is gonna go like that and because we're just starting this row we're gonna rely a little bit more on the spacers here just to make sure that our detail is perfect okay a little bit of a grout line there double-check this now because it looks off it was so we have a couple of details we have to work around one is the window now we're gonna have a finished window jamb coming out at this point there's a lot of space there to cover right but our window jamb is 3/4 thick and our casing is three and a half that's why we bought it because nothing your both the framing here is normal an old 1880s on so we're actually going to install our tile oh no I'm gonna come around the height of this drywall okay so I'm gonna mark it here popped about here no no all right let's do that one to start thank you then I'm gonna do around the plug now establish my grid line mark the outside of my box okay and then there's the top of my box gonna line my fingers up to scribe this room okay that's gonna be a grinder [Music] alright you got the other cut let's get this here no sooner than later get rid of your extra marks there yeah place [Music] is 7/8 rose I need four of these I'm just gonna show you a couple of tricks here we're using this straight edge and we're just going to run some adhesive into that groove right we want to basically fill that groove up because we don't want to rely on just the contact of the two edges the outside edges so we're filling up that groove right there there we go more than we're gonna need right there definitely gonna have a lot more than we need and that's fun because I want this to be a little bit sloppy at this point really I want to be able to press that in place because I'm following the contour of a wall here so I want to be able to seesaw that a little bit and get my edges all nice I've got a laser line drawn on the wall that's for the bottom of my tile so I just got to keep my line consistent here take the edge clean off the extra cement or adhesive like it is in this case anyway here we go and that's really the whole trick you know I had my son from later the joints on the wet saw this is one of these situations where you need a $400 tool to spend three and a half minutes cutting some tile to get a really good result my gap down there is pretty consistent roll that in okay so what I've done here is I've just mocked up the idea of what's gonna go inside the square so I just started off doing your herringbone pattern nice and simple and then I established a measurement from one of the tips to the tip because that is the perfect width of this thing right I'm just taking my square I'm drawing my lines and a cutting tile to lay on the countertop inside the context of this and creating all of my cuts like that and like this this is the best part of my job this so much fun beautiful so I can actually finish doing all of the cuts and laying it out and marking it here and then just translate this over inside the pattern and it's done nice and simple this is how you make sure everything stays nice and square I can't emphasize how awesome this is because when this is all finished I can add my adhesive which dries generally about 10 or 15 minutes so you can't move the tile I can translate all that over here real quick it gives me time to push things around just a little bit if I need to fix a detail or adjust a grout line that's the way to do something like this this context of a herringbone inside of the brick pattern it's going to be fantastic if you want to see more videos on how to do tile work and get all this kind of kitchen done click the link here and don't forget give us a thumbs up if you learned something today subscribe to our Channel hit the like button we'll see you next time

Channel: Home RenoVision DIY

Views: 115,975

Rating: 4.9255924 out of 5

Keywords: homerenovision, renovision, how to tile, kitchen tile tricks, backsplash tile tips, how to install herringbone tile, how to tile a kitchen splashback, how to tile a kitchen backsplash, how to tile a wall, how to tile herringblone, how to tile a herrinbone pattern, subway tile accents, how rto tile subway tile, tile tricks and tips, wall tile tricks, how to tile like aq ;pro, herringbone made easy tile tricks

Id: BTfW00l5MPY

Length: 30min 7sec (1807 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020