The backsplash is done(ish)!

Day 378 of the kitchen renovation and… we’ve officially completed tiling the backsplash. By "we" I mean Gary did all the hard work while I tried to assist. My job duties as his assistant mostly consist of handing him things and asking him stupid questions (How much would it be to tile the stairway and the ceiling?). I’m support staff.

I love how it turned out! Look at how beautiful this backsplash is:

The hood goes in the blank space. This isn’t some kind of weird statement piece.

The trick to marble tile is that you buy twice as much as you need and then you pick out the ones you like and return the ugly ones. There's a lot of variation, cracking, and weird veining that goes on with marble. Natural stone is scary. Gary took the first sweep of all of the tiles--picking out the ones he approved of and then I did a second sweep going back through every piece of backsplash tile and marking the spots I didn’t like with blue tape. Then he could cut around the bad parts or use them as ends. Yes, I realize we are a lot of work.

I love the Venatino marble but it was really hard to cut it on the tile saw. It falls apart when it gets wet. I don’t know how any of those old marble statues have survived at all because marble is really unstable. I’m sure there is some way to fix that but we couldn’t figure it out.

It also looks three shades darker until it dries because the tile is natural stone and it absorbs the water and has to dry out. I thought something was seriously wrong or that we had used the wrong mastic because it was super dark when we started. Once the tile and the mastic dried, it went back to the correct color so don’t freak out if you decide to use marble.

AGhhhh!!

It starts out this dark and then lightens up a few days later.

And look at how difficult these cuts were. Gary is the master of the tile saw. It’s really nice to live with someone who can do anything. If I had to do this myself, it would be a hot mess and I’d probably have to buy stick-on backsplash or contact paper.

WTAF that is an impressive cut! #hoorayforGary

I love how this is turning out. We are (allegedly) getting appliances this week so fingers crossed we have a dishwasher and refrigerator next week. Not having a functional kitchen for over a year has been quite trying but the worst part (BY FAR) was not having an ice machine. I'm not sure why but using ice cube trays to make your own ice is really miserable. This is the amount of spoiled I've become over the years. I'm too fancy to make my own ice in trays and I'm okay with that. Bring on my icemaker!