A Terrible Tile Tale with a Happy Ending

If you’ve been a regular reader of The Eastern Parkway Project, you know that we had a terrible time getting the countertop and tile floor and backsplash installed in our kitchen. We hired Lifestyle Marble and Granite to handle all three tasks. However, after botching the countertop fabrication, Dave, the owner, decided to give us back our money rather than complete the job (See Counterop Catastrophe).

 

While it was great to get our money back, we were left without a floor or countertop and just the beginnings of a backsplash.

 

 

 

Fortunately we were able to find other companies to complete the countertop and tile floor installations. (Shout out to Ecounters.com and Lowe’s respectively.) But companies we sought out for the backsplash either didn’t handle backsplash installations or they wanted to charge us the cost of doing a backsplash installation from scratch.

 

I was left with no other choice but to attempt to complete the backsplash installation myself. Since I’d never done this before, I consulted several Web sites and home repair books to figure out exactly what I needed to do.

 

Armed with a wealth of information, I headed to my local Home Depot to rent a wet saw. However, once I got there I discovered that the saw was much too heavy for me to take home by myself. It was around Christmas and my husband had left early to spend time with his family. I was going to be joining him the next week and wanted to be able to surprise him with a finished backsplash when we both returned home.

 

So I asked the salesperson in the tile department if a regular manual tile cutter could handle diagonal cuts, as the design of our backsplash called for many of these. He assured me that it could, so I purchased the tile cutter and headed home to tackle this daunting task.

 

I quickly learned that, yes, the manual tile cutter can make diagonal cuts; however, for each triangle I needed, it took three or four tries to get the exact size tile for the space that needed to be filled. After about five hours I had completed the wall the tile abandoner had started, minus a few pieces behind the stove that need to be notched, a task my little manual tile cutter was not capable of.

 

As I prepared to begin the adjacent wall, I discovered that the wall was not even (thanks to Best Wall Plastering. See If These Walls Could Talk). While I had become quite handy with Durabond over the course of our renovation work, leveling the wall was beyond my capabilities. With our renovation funds running low, this wasn’t a task we wanted to hire a professional to handle, especially given our multiple bad experiences with previous contractors. Luckily, my father is quite handy in this area. The only catch was we would need to wait until spring for my father’s next visit. (Winters in western New York are not good for driving). So we spent five months with the backsplash looking like this:

 

 

 

As my father will tell you, I’m a very impatient woman. However, I waited out the winter without complaint. But I was all too happy when the first signs of spring arrived so my father could make his journey to Brooklyn by car. But then needed repairs at his own home required us to wait until May for him to visit.

 

Once my father arrived, he smoothed out the defective wall and we were able to go to Home Depot to rent a wet saw. While the wet saw made cutting notches out of tiles easier, it still took a couple of tries to get the tiles exactly as I needed them. After working for six hours two days in a row, I was able to complete laying the tiles.

 

As an avid viewer of HGTV, I’d seen horror stories of homeowners attempting to grout tiles. This caused me to wait a whole month before taking on the task. Just like laying the tiles, grouting was an arduous task. It took about four hours from start to finish, but all the effort was worth it because in the end we had this….