Spacing a Glass Mosaic Tile Backsplash and Install Part 1

hello everybody today we're going to start tiling a backsplash on this wall underneath my cabinets so about two years ago I went through a process of doing a major renovation to our house and maybe also more of that in a different video but we're sitting here home under self-isolation and I'm just looking at things that I can do without leaving the house I've been staring at that backsplash project for a very long time I thought now would be a good idea at a good time to start that I think I'll do a little bit of maybe how-to and a little bit of just just doing it so you can watch I'm not really sure how that's gonna look yet we'll see now this hexagonal green mosaic tile and it's gonna mixture of things is like there's some glass tiles there's some bits of granite or maybe it's marble and there's three or four different colors in here and on the back as many mosaic tiles come there's that mesh that holds the whole thing together so it's quite flexible when you're doing a job like this one of the first things you want to do is lay out your tiles to see where they fit on the wall so that you don't end up with a very very small cuts on the corners or things that look bad like that and on this wall the inside corner over there is most visible the one that's over here is blocked by the wall can't be seen by most things so I want to make sure that this corner over here is going to show the best possible bit of my top so I'm going to start my spacing over there so the tile has two different aspects there's one with a flat edge along here and there's one where every edge is bumpy and in order to reduce the cutting to a minimum I want to keep this flat edge along the bottom so something like like this and I think that'll just make the cuts that I have to do far fewer [Music] so my goal with that is just to see where the full tiles lay out and make sure there's no really big problems with really small cuts as I mentioned before so let's just take a really close look up and see what we're left with so here we are tiles are all laid out and you can see I've just kind of loosely placed them kind of approximating where the where the gaps will be so that I know how much space it doesn't need to be perfect at this point I've just laid them out and I've got one two three four five six seven eight full tiles there and with this gap that I've left the approximate Gabby you can kind of see that the end of this tile and the beginning of this one kind of overlaps a little bit like a half maybe but I can see I'm gonna need about a tile and a half maybe tiling 3/4 to make that cut look nice so as I mentioned I thought a tile in three quarters was what I'm going to need but then I forgot to consider the fact that at the other end this one doesn't have a flush edge to butt up against the wall either so I'm going to be cutting off a bit of this so that these tiles can sit flush against the wall that means that this whole layout will be shifting that way by a half an inch or so which when we come back here creates a problem for me so I'm going to take this one tile here and I'm going to cover it over approximately will be fine today the cut off that I'll be making of the tiles that I was planning on cutting off so that would look something like that I'd be moving it over about that much and you can see there's a little bit of an overlap there just what I would cut off from here that line here is what I cut off so that will be approximating like that that distance now when I come back to this wall level tile you can see currently it is sitting at two full tiles and I still have to cut this off which means that after I cut off this flush edge there will be the smallest of slivers left and that doesn't make for a nice looking tile now a small little bit like that up against the wall doesn't look very good so how do I solve that well I have to come back to the very beginning and instead of just cutting off a small little bit I'm gonna have to come fuller into the tile and make the cut here somewhere in the middle of this tile pushing the whole thing that way and leaving my last tiles over there thicker okay so I can see that I've got my overlap here just like I moved it out before and I've gone and cut off two strips from the main tile and if I slide that in place I'm starting to hone in on my spacing now you could see what's left between the wall and the counter is a section of tile that's this big well that's pretty small but it sure is better than what I had it spaced out before on our very first try which looks a lot like this and nobody wants to see a very small piece of glass in there how will look very bad so pulling the whole thing this way gives me a bigger piece to work with and that's still small but what can you do on the other side I'll be cutting fully half of this tile away I could even go a little bit more to try and echo the cut on the other side so that the tiles are perfectly spaced in the middle that that's the the ideal so each one of these little hexa hexagons is 2 inches in width and I think right over here I have about an inch reveal so I'd like to keep that about the same I'd like to have about an inch reveal here in an interview over there we're showing you about a half a tile so I'm gonna make my marks and measure out cuts down this first row of tile at an inch ok so there's that line marked out halfway through that tile now I'm gonna cut a line I'm going to cut this part of the tile off and keep the flood and to go against the wall but as I mentioned these are glass tiles and these ones here I think it's marble so I'm gonna call the marble from now on marble and stones they're different materials so they're gonna cut differently marble or ceramic or porcelain I would happily run it through a wet saw but glass is unpredictable in wet saws and so I'm gonna have to cut these tiles individually and let me show you how you do that you use a possibility of three tools or combination or three tools first of all I'm gonna use this diamond wheel diamond blade scoring knife to run a line across the tile and then I'm gonna use a snapper it's best if we look this way it has this flange on the other side here to press against both side of your cuts and you squeeze them together like pliers and the tile snaps right in the middle on the scored line now this one also has a diamond wheel on it but I've always found that this particular tool isn't as sharp as my handheld one so I'll use that one and then if there are any weird edges that pop up I have a pair of nippers and I've had really bad luck with glass but they still do work on occasion so the best for ceramic and porcelain by the wall current glass so let's go get that together and cut those oh I'm gonna use this trowel to be my straightedge I'm gonna take by a knife and I don't know if you'll be able to hear but there's a grinding sound when you make a cut hopefully that shows up it just makes this makes a little score on the glass actually I don't want to use the troll no I just made a cut here and well you can see that and it is not perfectly on my line and that's fine it totally is okay because that corner is gonna be hidden by caulking anyways doesn't need to be perfect perfect it's gonna be a trouble to snap that one with my snapping tool but the actual the actual cut itself doesn't need to be super perfect yeah this marble sounds different because it's not the same as glass it just cuts different it's not so much easier okay there we are I've made my scores and there's the line I mean now it's time to use my snapping tool I'm gonna take it and put these two pieces here on the same side as the score line so that they're pushing down and this bottom piece will actually rest on the score line on the underside and the whole thing will just snap in half and that works really really we'll let me just line up my first one here there we are there's the first one see it's snapped off in a fairly clean line as well alright let me just do the rest of these and you can see okay so here they are they're all cut apart now and I can go ahead and snap them just a little bit of care will be fine even the glass broke really really well another marble one they break so easy it's nice last ones a little bit crazier doesn't take much effort that score line is good okay there they are and on the backside they've got that mesh I'm sorry I'm gonna cut that away right now and there we are they're all cut and they're all separate but I laid in place and so you can see now that once these are on the wall this will be a nice flush and smooth line too but up against the corner and that's really where we're gonna start so here we are with the cut tiles up against the wall and I've followed through and laid out all the spacing again through the whole thing and let's look at what we have on the other side so you can see that still a smallish cut and it's it's smaller than what you see on the other side but that's okay cuz the other side gets covered by the next tiling that butts up so the spacing will be about the same and now I can cut these small pieces from the off cuts of the last one hopefully and there we have it the last Rose cut so my wall is now covered from end to end in tiles the layout is done and I can start putting this first row up on the wall well there we are that's the layout done at least half the layout if you enjoyed what you saw and you want to check out more please come back for the second episode where we start to adhere the titles to the wall and of course please press the subscribe button and so you can watch the rest of our great progress Thanks you

Channel: Discovery Mill

Views: 11,192

Keywords: back splash

Id: uUpDfiiuqSg

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020