Retiling the Backsplash: Application of Tile

Once we were finished putting cement board underneath where all of our backsplash tile would go, it was time to actually stick 'em up! This process was the easiest and most fun part in my opinion. 


The materials we used for this part were:

• the tile sheets
• a utility knife and pair of scissors (for cutting around the individual pieces/sections of tile on the mesh backing)
• glass tile thin-set mortar: we used this one, this is what goes between your wall and the tile and makes it stick
• a 3/16 trowel like this one, this is what you use to apply the thin-set and give it nice grooves to ensure suction between the tile and the wall.  
• a big bucket for mixing up the thin-set 
• a plastic butter knife, used for "back-buttering" the individual tiles when we had to put them up in mosaic fashion
• tile nippers: we had to do some trial and error on cutting our tiles since we had a combination of glass and marble. these nippers worked great for the softer marble tiles while these worked well for the glass tiles. 

This is the backerboard surface we started with: 

You can see we laid out the tiles after cutting around for the electrical outlets while the thin-set was setting up. It should be the texture of peanut butter or toothpaste.

We just worked in small sections so that the thin-set wouldn't dry on us. When it did, we just scraped it off with a chisel and reapplied.

And this is how it looked after being applied. For the pieces around the corners and the electrical boxes, it was time to get creative with mosaic. This was the most fun part! We used no rhyme or reason, just cut pieces with their respective nippers to fit and applied thin-set on the back of the individual pieces with a plastic butter knife.

At this point we felt relief because we were actually starting to have a backsplash again and we loved the way it looked. The only thing left to do was grout...