Our Kitchen Needed a Face-lift: Part 2

This is part two of this post about our kitchen face-lift project. To see part one, then go here.

Our "to-do list" for this past weekend:

Weekend #2: Install back-splash, grout, and seal tile; touch up paint where demo scratched the walls, and put new molding on old bar area, now just a half wall.

Well, it turned out that our project will be a 3 weekend project. That's okay though. I didn't end up buying the tile until late Friday afternoon, so we didn't get started tiling until 7pm that night, instead on 1pm like we planned. Since it was later, Brent didn't want to be using the tile cutter and bothering our neighbors so we installed as much as we could that didn't need to be cut on Friday and did the rest on Saturday, but had to be finished and cleaned up by 4pm.



We could have done work on Saturday afternoon and evening on the bar molding, but instead we were invited to go see Jeff Foxworthy and some of the other Blue Comedy Tour guys. It was a fun night with friends and a great break from the project. We even got to meet Jeff because he is the one that gave Brent's dad the tickets! Jeff is one of his customers.



On Sunday afternoon, we grouted the tile in the kitchen and bar. It is supposed to dry for 48-72 hours before you seal it, so I sealed it yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon. This was too messy to get any pictures, but I wish I had some now. Oh well.

Laying the tile was the easy part for me. I know that cutting some of the weird angles were probably a challenge but I didn't do any of that. The grout was tough though. There is this tool you use to spread the grout in the cracks but it is so big and our backsplash area is so small so that presented a small challenge. And then washing all the excess off, wow! That took hours alone. It looks wonderful now but it was a lot of work.


(The tile is not sealed yet and still has a slight haze from the grout.)

Final result pictures to come once the bar is finished.