Home Improvement Help
Open For Business
Let’s see… when we last left off on Monday, our open shelves had been primed in preparation for their big hanging debut.
While we had the primer out we went ahead and slapped a coat on the hood cover too (using a 2″ angled brush in the cracks followed by a small foam roller to smooth everything out). Things were instantly looking less wood-sy on that wall.
Once the primer dried on both – we used Zinsser Smart Prime which is low-VOC and was recommended by a few pro cabinet painters that we know – out came the same high-durability paint that we used on our cabinets (yes, there’s still plenty left!) and we gave the brackets, shelves, and the hood a couple of coats. Two thin and even ones over one coat of primer did the trick. We also applied those with a 2″ angled brush followed by a small foam roller to keep things smooth and even. Oh and the paint is Benjamin Moore Advance paint in Cloud Cover, bee-tee-dubs (which many pros use to paint the inside of their clients’ cabinets along with the outside, so it should stand up really well to everyday use once it’s nice an cured up).
But the exciting stuff really started to happen when we finally got to the point of ACTUALLY PUTTING STUFF ON THE WALL. Yowza. Sorry for the caps. I said we were excited, right? Excited might be an understatement actually. Luckily, since we had already drilled all of our screws into the wall, the hanging step was pretty easy. Up went the brackets on the short side…
…followed moments later by the shelves themselves. Can I get an “Ooooh”? How about and “Ahhhhh”?
Don’t worry, we weren’t gonna just let them sit there unsecured. We just had some other things to do first – like making sure everything was still level. It was. Phew.
So then we put everything up on the long side of the wall.
We had mentioned in the previous post that we had originally planned to screw the shelves into the wall (we even made some pocket holes in preparation for this step). Well, after feeling how solid the brackets felt (more on that here) and not really wanting to put 12 more cringe-inducing holes in our tile – we opted to just use those pocket holes as a spot to screw the shelves firmly into the brackets (so the screw actually went straight down, not at the angle of the pocket hole). In hindsight, we definitely could’ve skipped the pocket hole step, but at least now the screw will be hidden in a spot that we can easily caulk over.
Speaking of caulk, that was our next step after everything was drilled together. Since there were some dark seams where the shelves met the brackets, we just ran a thin bead of white paintable caulk along the top of each bracket and smoothed it with our finger to make the shelves and brackets look more like one unit. Tedious? A smidge. Worth it? Totally. Then of course we painted over it so everything matched.
And with that folks, we were done! Except for more waiting. Booooo.
As eager as we are to immediately fill them with plates and bowls and cups, we resisted that urge in order to let all of the paint cure a little bit longer – just because we caulked those screw holes and around the edges which called for some touch up paint. We definitely don’t want to jump the “fully cured” gun (which could result in a bunch of dents and dings in our shelves during their first few days of use). So for now we’ll just have to enjoy these empty “after” shots thanks to following the full curing time on the paint can’s directions. But tomorrow – oh baby, it’s on. Sherry’s even planning to shoot a little time lapse video of the process of loading them up.
Oh and of course we still have to add crown molding to the ceiling to finish things off and make the top of the hood a lot more seamless. But slowly it’s all feeling a lot closer to “done” than “just started” – especially now that the hood is painted too (never mind the fact that we still have some patch work to do on the ceiling along with that aforementioned crown molding).
We’re really happy with how the brackets turned out, so we haven’t thought twice about our decision not to do true floating shelves. We think these are really charming – and they’re super stable so Sherry could probably hang off of them if she wanted. Instead she wants to fill them with ceramic animals. Same difference.
It’s nice that there’s still plenty of room to load them up and make them really functional, even with the brackets (no, they will not actually end up full of ceramic animals- not on my watch). Our shelves are deep enough for our 12″ dinner plates and the brackets are 15″ apart so we should have lots o’ room to put everyday stuff up there – which we hear from other open-shelf-having folks works really well, since it’s used often enough not to get dusty).
And even though it was a bit weird at first to see our wall of penny tile suddenly broken up by these bright white lines, it’s cool to see the thing we’ve always envisioned come that much closer to being a reality.
So we should have pics (and a video) of the shelves all filled for you tomorrow. Until then, we’ll leave you with this slightly-closer-to-after shot of the room. We’re definitely getting there. And we’re counting down the seconds to Operation Cork My Floor (along with adding that crown molding, patching the ceiling, adding a pendant over the sink, covering the base of the peninsula with some decorative wood planks, hanging some art to the right of the fridge, do something to the side of the pantry, etc).
We feel especially giddy when we look at old photos of the room back when it looked like this:
We can hardly picture that old room anymore. Isn’t it funny how quickly your brain replaces things? It’s so crazy that we lived with the room just like that for over six months before even painting the paneling. But once we finally got the ball rolling… well, it’s still rolling. Haha. Is anyone else in the home stretch of one of their home projects? Though I probably should knock on wood when I say that, since it sounds like a sure way to jinx myself into some last-minute wrench in the plan (he says as he gets up to literally go knock on wood while crossing his fingers and eyes).
Holey Moley
Our ceiling was having a little hole problem after some electrical wizork last week (warning: $herdog is in full effect in this post)…
So we did the normal thing and donned sunglasses and hats along with breathing masks. Why? Because we can’t find our safety glasses (book shoots = can’t really find anything). And ceiling dust is gross when it’s up your nizzle.
Then we got our patch on. I’m the designated Spackle Wench in our family, but John has longer arms, so he helped me by doing step one: lightly sanding the outside of the holes we were patching.
Then it was time for these guys from Home Depot. They’re basically a wire mesh patch that’s stuck to sticky paper. You stick it on the hole firmly, spackle over it, sand things down, and paint. Das it. They really make things pretty easy – even on a ceiling (the most notoriously annoying plane to work on in any room). Hardest part: gravity. More on that later (there’s video evidence of my struggle).
After the mesh patch is stuck up on the wall (darn, no pics of that, but that’s all in the video), just get some spackle on the biggest putty knife you have and squish it all over the mesh pad. Smooth it as much as you can with the spackle knife, but know that sanding everything down afterwards is when you’ll get the finished look you’re going for (so it’s always better to build things up slightly more than you need since you can always sand it down).
Then just wait the recommended drying time and get to sanding. I like to use a sanding block when it comes to sanding large planes like walls and ceilings, just because it keeps things straight (sandpaper is so floppy that it’s hard to keep things as rigid in this case, but it’s great for sanding furniture since it flexes to follow the lines of those items, like the legs of a chair).
After sanding everything (and sweeping/vacuuming/showering to get the white powder off of everythingintheentirekitchen-urgh!) it hopefully looks like this. See the three dark-ish areas where those holes used to be? They just need some paint (along with other dirty areas of the ceiling that got grunged up under the old fluorescent lights).
Here’s the hole next to the new pendant lights that we patched too. Oh and see the one over the sink- that’s still waiting for a fixture, so it stays. We’re on the hunt so we’ll keep you posted when we plug that guy up with something light and pretty.
Two coats of ceiling paint later (bless the previous owners for leaving that behind for us), any evidence of those old holes were history:
Here’s the other former-hole next to the pendants after paint. See it? Me either. Huzzah!
And here’s a video. Admittedly, things got a little wonky (falling spackle, shrieking Sherry, an offhanded mention of a slug, etc). Yes, there are outtakes right in the middle of the thing. But it kind of perfectly captures the whole process. You’re gonna get messy, and it might take a few tries to get things to stick. But in the end, you can totally get ‘er done. As in, this is about a 2 on the difficulty scale. So put on your Brave Girl Underoos and get ‘er done! Or your Brave Boy Underoos if you’ve got those.
Hope that comes in handy for ya. Next up in the kitch: shelf planning and hood painting. Hootie hoo. Then floors. Momma’s excited. Bring on the colorful plates and bowls! Ah accessorizing, the best phase of every project. And the cork – that’ll be a room-changer for sure. What are you guys up to this week? Any hole patching? Shelf building? Painting? Secret project-ing? Spackle-dodging? Tell $herdog all about it.
How’s It Hanging?
That was the big question last week. Not in the “Hey, how ya doing?” sense of things, but more in the “Um, how are we gonna hang this $60 hood we found on Craigslist” kind of way.
Sherry talked last week about how we planned to encase it in a DIY’d wood cover (see inspiration pics back on last week’s post). Both of us were so excited about (1) the price tag and (2) the final look that we didn’t really think through the middle part: actually installing the darn thing. So yeah… #planningfail?
Here was our challenge (beyond just not having any of the installation materials or instruction): this is an under-cabinet hood and, well, we don’t have any cabinets to install it under. I figured that there were dozens of sites online detailing how to convert an under-cabinet hood to a wall-mounted one, so I wasn’t worried… until my Google searches started coming up empty. That’s when I started to second guess our plan. Was this just something that couldn’t be done?
Then I discovered these.
We didn’t buy these (our hood is Jenn-Air brand). But the fact that Kenmore sold bracket specifically “for mounting range hoods to wall when overhead cabinet is not used” meant it was not a completely crazy idea to retrofit ours to hang on the wall as well. So Sherry and I concocted a plan, did some shopping, and readied ourselves for some hood hanging (and possible hood hanging failure, as is always a possibility when we attempt to figure this stuff out as we go). This picture will make more sense soon, but just know it involved some wood pieces as a makeshift mounting panel and some heavy duty metal brackets as a stand-in for a cabinet.
But before we could put our plan in motion, some details needed to be taken care of. You know, little things like oh-yeah-we-didn’t-tile-high-enough-under-the-vent-pipe. Another lapse in planning. Oh well, it took about 20 minutes to whip up a small batch of thinset and fill it in with some spare tiles. Yes, it was slightly maddening to have to go back to the tiling phase (especially for eight measly rows) but by this point we’ve learned just to laugh. Wince a little. Laugh some more. And get it done.
Then we mapped out all the important stuff on the wall to ensure that things would hang where they were supposed to hang. Looks pretty crazy, right? But I promise it makes lots of sense…
All of this painters tape is marking important reference points, such as:
- 1 & 2: Where our floating shelves would go – important because we wanted the bottom of the hood and the top shelf to be lined up (which was about 34″ from the top of the counter which is right between the hood manufacturer’s recommended 30″ – 36″ distance from the stovetop)
- 3, 4, & 5: Where our studs are – important so we could attach the hood securely to the wall
- 6: The center point of our stove – important so the hood would hang squarely over the stove
In case you’re wondering how I located the studs, it was actually thanks to some forethought on Sherry’s part. Back when that wall was open she begged me to somehow mark where they were before we tiled and covered everything up, so I opted to make small marks on the ceiling to keep track of where each stud was. Then I taped a piece of thread to that mark, tied a paper clip to the other end (to weigh it down) and voila – a perfectly marked stud all the way down the wall. And once we hang our crown molding around the ceiling those little stud-marking dots will be hidden once and for all.
With all of our guides marked, it was time to screw in our first piece of wood. Here’s the deal with the wood. The hood by itself was technically wide enough to hang from two studs, except the studs didn’t line up with the two notched holes in the back of the hood (which were at either end) and I didn’t trust that it would hold that way even if they were lined up perfectly.
So we figured we’d screw a slightly wider-than-the-hood piece of wood into two studs (and use a heavy duty anchor to secure it in a third location) and then hang the hood onto additional screws that lined up with the hood’s notched holes. We actually got a contractor’s blessing (just didn’t feel right drilling into our pretty wall o’ tile without double checking our plan with an expert first. So after that phone call we took a few deep breaths and moved on to the next (very scary) part of our plan: drilling into our tile. GASP.
I bought a special bit that’s meant for glass and tile. It took a bit of pressure, but eventually I got all of my holes drilled. Though I think we both silently freaked out the entire time drilling was in progress.
Once we got over having riddled our tile with holes (okay, there were just six) I used some 2.5″ screws to secure the chunky plank of wood to the wall. I have to tell you, feeling those screws grab the stud so tightly was one of the most confidence inspiring parts of this process. I felt like I could’ve hung my whole body weight from this thing – that is, if I was able to grip the tiny ledge with my lanky girl fingers.
With one board in (to hang the hood from) I then had to attach a second one (to hang the brackets from) also with long screws into two studs and a third set of screws into heavy duty anchors to further enforce things. Then it looked a little something like this. Note: the vent pipe is slightly off-center, not the boards (so once we build the frame for the hood that will be solved and it’ll all look centered). Oh, and the blue arrows are pointing to the two screws that the hood will hang from.
We felt pretty good when we realized that most upper cabinets are just held to studs with screws and then loaded up with dishes and plates and other items (and then a hood might be added on top of all that weight) and the whole shebang stays up.
Speaking of which, it was time to put the hood up (since the brackets would need to go up after the hood). Okay, so maybe this part was scarier than drilling into tile. We half pictured the whole wall of tile pulling off of the studs. But lucky for us, it didn’t budge. It was up there solid as a rock. Which is good news, because clearly I could use less time worrying about hanging hoods and more time spent shaving…
Anyways. Sherry supported the hood just in case (she’s the perfect height to rest it on her head from underneath it while standing on a small stepladder) and I attached the brackets to the wood panel and then into the hood using the same slots where it would’ve attached to a wall cabinet.
It was feeling plenty secure by this point, so I relieved Sherry’s head from hood-holding duties while I secured the second bracket and she took some more photos.
Once it was tightly held to the wall, I took care of some of the finishing touches – like attaching the vent pipe to the hood and plugging it in (btw, how lucky were we that the existing plug hole in the range hood was pretty much perfectly placed for our outlet???) – and we were in business. Phew! Update: We’ve since learned that metal foil tape (sold at hardware stores) is better for taping that duct together than duct tape (regardless of the more fitting name of the latter – haha) so we’ll be retaping that vent with foil tape to keep the seal nice and strong for the long term. Thanks for the tip guys!
Okay, so admittedly it looks kinda ugly right now. The exposed pipe / wood / giant hole in ceiling aren’t really a good look, are they?
But it was a good start. Not only did we have a hood for the first time in over two months, but we had a hood that wasn’t crazy close to the stove like our old microwave was (we hung it 34″ from the top of the counter which is right between the hood manufacturer’s recommended 30″ – 36″ distance from the stovetop). And this hood has two fancy light settings. Oooooh. Ahhhhh.
And I know the exposed wood looks kinda crazy – especially because it sticks out about an inch on the sides. But I promise this is all part of a plan (hint: they’ll make for a good spot to attach my homemade wood hood cover), so just bear with me for a couple of days.
Oh and don’t mind this POV, we didn’t have the filters snapped in yet (they’re basically big stainless steel rectangles, so it looks a lot better from below once those are in). We’ll have to share more photos soon.
Now in case you’re still worried about this thing coming crumbling down overnight (we were – we actually pulled the stove out before we went to bed the first night just in case!), know that it has survived a few full days now with nary a creak or shake. So without jinxing ourselves, Sherry and I are calling this hanging project a success. All is good in the hood, as they say. Between the long screws going firmly into those studs and the heavy duty brackets also adding extra from-the-top support, this guy is pretty darn secure. So after a few days of breath-holding, Captain Careful can officially exhale.
Now for the fun (?) part – building a pretty wood cover for it. Somebody crank up my jams! We’ll be back with all those details in a few days, but in the meantime, what did you guys do this weekend? Any heavy-object hanging? Tile drilling? Using your head to support something? Oh and something crazy crazy crazy is going on in our house today (well, it starts today and lasts for the next three weeks!!!) so we’ll fill you in on all that tomorrow (once we have lived through one day of it and have some photos to share).
I See The Light!
Remember when we shared how shiny and polished our kitchen started to look after we finished grouting?
And then revealed the chaos that ensued a hot minute later?
Well, the room is all put back together and we made a whole lotta lighting cha-cha-changes.
Sure our ceiling looks like swiss cheese. But it’s all for a good cause. Inching towards a more luminescent kitchen.
Everyone says that lighting can make the room, but I’m here to refute that. Just kidding, it totally makes the room. If you have a gorgeous space but it looks dark or yellowed or all angry and fluorescent, well, it kinda ruins the whole effect. So we knew something had to be done since even after getting new white counters and painting our cabinets it was still totally lacking in functional lighting. Specifically, the peninsula was really dark and the area near the sink kind of made me feel like I was standing under a bug zapper. And that never-used-in-13-months fan had to go. It sort of felt like a low flying helicopter monitoring dinner preparation. So down they came. And holes they did leave.
Oh but here’s a money saving tip for ya: do as much pre-work for the electricians as possible since you pay them by the hour for their time. We always remove old fixtures (like the fan, the fluorescents, etc). After turning off the power to them of course (Captain Safety would have my head if I didn’t mention that little detail…).
Even marking the ceiling for where you want things can end up taking an hour of discussion while the electrician is there (and when you pay them by the hour, you’re paying them to watch you have that discussion), so hammering that out before they come is great. For example, John stood on a stool and held the glass lids to our cereal jars in the air to guess where we wanted the placement of the two pendant lights that will someday hang over the peninsula.
That weird little exercise helped us figure out where we wanted those fixture boxes pretty quickly. We didn’t have to figure out the height of the pendants yet or anything, which is nice since we don’t have them to hang yet (we’ll install those on our own and make that decision later). So we just used small pieces of painters tape to make an X in the desired location.
Then it was my turn to dance on the dining table to make another mark up there.
We actually have three rooms in our house without any overhead lights: the living room, the sunroom, and the dining room. And the only one we really use at night (without tons of lamps that happen to live on a super long console table and nearby desk) is the dining room. As in, dinners are pretty dark in there. Or we bring in mismatched floor lamps and it looks like a lighting convention. We have visions of a giant chandelier hanging over that big daddy table of ours someday. So you know what they say about “when in Rome…” – well, I have the same philosophy about squeezing as much work in when the electricians are already here working on a job (saves you the money/time of having them out again to work on a nearby room).
We had also chatted with the electricians the last time they were out and they said four can lights should do the trick on the cooking side of the kitchen, so we even marked their placement with little Xs drawn in the middle of more painters tape, just outside of the fluourescents on either side.
We also had them add an outlet on the counter to the right of the fridge (we have one next to the peninsula for laptops, but we thought an above-counter one would come in handy for plugging in mixers to make cookies on that side of the peninsula, etc)…
… and here are those four can lights they put in, in lieu of the previous two fluorescents that sandwiched the fan, which we had them ceremoniously kill (aka: they terminated the power to those poor guys).
Oh and for any interested locals, we use S.J. Ryan Electric. Good guys, fair prices, all that good stuff (they don’t even know we’re bloggers, we just love to shout out people who do good work). We really like them because as an experienced two-man team they can knock out a lot of stuff in not too much time. For example, in 5 hours they:
- Added four recessed lights
- Terminated the two old fixture boxes that fed the fluorescents
- Terminated the fan fixture box
- Added an outlet above the counter next to the fridge
- Added two fixture boxes over the peninsula
- Terminated the fixture box for the poorly placed pendant a foot to the left of our new pendant fixture boxes
- Added a fixture box above the table in our dining room (and a light switch for it)
- Centered a fixture box over the sink (the previous over-sink-light was about 6 inches too far to the left)
Note: Ick, don’t mind all the photos where the tile/paneling meet the ceiling that are still waiting for crown molding to go up. Soon we hope!
So at around $75 an hour for those two guys, it added up to $375 for all of that stuff (plus around $80 for the materials). Total room changer. Four recessed lights! Two new pendant spots! A centered fixture box for a nice pendant over the sink! A new outlet on a wall that had none! And a spot for a big ol’ chandelier in the dining room! Plus they safely terminated all sorts of things we didn’t need anymore!
Ack, please don’t report me to the Exclamation Point Police for overuse. I just get excited about this stuff. I like sharing those prices because I think people generally think electrical work is more expensive than it is. And it certainly can get up there. But things like marking your placement and removing old fixtures beforehand can really speed things up along with hiring a two-man team. And having a ranch doesn’t hurt since it’s so easy for them to run around in the attic and wire stuff (we hear two story houses can be trickier since there’s not exactly an attic above the first floor to creep around in with wires).
So that’s the electrical bid-ness that went on. Things definitely have come a long way since the last time they came…
Now we just have some pendants to grab and some holes to fill- and you know we’ll share all the details as we inch along. Update: we found pendants and have hood info to share! Tomorrow morning for sure!
What did you guys do this weekend? We got a giant box delivered by FedEx on Saturday and it was our final book manuscript. All 375 pages of it (it’s one-sided and double spaced, which explains why it’s waaay longer than the book will be, even after we add tons of pics and illustrations).
Ahhhhhh! Sitting on the sofa with that hunk o’ paper was more than a little surreal.
Psst- This is one of those things that just makes your heart swell up into your throat. One of the five finalists for the Ikea Life Improvement Project was a reader of ours named Melissa Matthews who found out about it back when we randomly mentioned it during an Ikea giveaway, and entered… never thinking she’d end up in the finals (we were so excited to get an elated email from her all about it)! Well, guess what? She won, guys! She wrote an amazing makes-you-cry email to tell us all about it. As the mother of a child with Down syndrome, Melissa is planning to expand the work being done at the Frankie Lemmon School in Raleigh, NC, a school for children with intellectual disabilities. They use technology and cutting-edge therapy to help these children with special needs and Melissa plans to use the new resources and her teaching background to infuse more technology deeper into these classrooms and to create a website to share these methods with other teachers across the country. We’re just so happy for her!
Grout, Grout, Let It All Out
This is a thing you can’t do it with out. Come on. I’m talkin’ to you. Come onnnn. (Okay, enough with the Tears for Fears reference). Let’s talk about grout, because with our penny rounds finally all installed, grout was next on the agenda. It has a way of taking things from in-progress to looks-completely-finished-oh-thank-goodness. Observe:
So here’s how we got there. First I have a little “materials shot” for ya:
- Bucket of clean water
- Putty knife & another bucket to mix grout in
- Paper towels because, well, grout is messy
- Sanded grout (from The Tile Shop, $19 with discount) – ours is the Mobe Pearl color
- Rubber float (from Home Depot, $2)
- Flexible Grout Admixture (from The Tile Shop, $17 with discount) – this reduces grout shrinking and cracking
- Sponge. Woot!
Oh and we used leftover rosin paper from Home Depot to prep the room, since it was again helpful in keeping the mess off of our counters.
Grout, like thinset, is another mixture that you only want to make in small batches – since it’ll dry out after about 20-30 minutes. So according to the instructions, I started by pouring a bit of admixture into my bucket and then adding the grout powder second.
Just like with my thinset, I used my putty knife to mix everything together until I got a that toothpaste-y consistency that I found easiest to work with.
I had forgotten how much I enjoy grouting. That may be an overstatement, but after the focus it took to actually install the tile it was fun to do something that took very little thinking. It was basically just using the float to smoosh the grout onto the tile and, more importantly, into the cracks. Sherry helped too. She was less into it than I was. Ha.
Once we made sure we didn’t miss any spaces, we held the float at an angle and scraped off some of the excess from the front of the tiles. Then it was time for some sponge-and-water action. This not only cleans grout off the front of the tiles, but also kinda smooths the grout between the tiles. It’s kinda weirdly amazing to me how simple but helpful this step is.
If you want to see these steps in actions, we managed to film this little one-take video of it. Clara’s need for a cream-cheese refill cut it a smidge short, but you get the point:
Admittedly the task is a bit tedious – and more than bit taxing on your wrist – but we managed to get it all done in one afternoon.
The difference between an ungrouted and grouted tile job still amazes us. Just when we thought we couldn’t love our penny rounds more. You can see the difference below – the left side has dried grout in it, the right side is ungrouted. You can also see how much lighter the grout gets once it dries. Of course there’s still a haze on the grouted tiles on the left, so they don’t look as gleamy as they do once you buff that off with a cloth after it has fully dried.
Oh, and since people had asked before – here’s a picture of the corner seam after it was filled with caulk that matches our grout. We also caulked the seam where the tile meets the counter (that’s still drying in this pic, so it looks darker along that bottom edge). This was taken before we buffed the tile with a cloth though, so it’s kinda chalky. But you get the idea.
Here’s the whole room completely done, though it’s kinda hard to make sense of it at this picture size – since it sort of just looks like a gray wall. Haha. But in person it’s approximately 50 times bigger than this photo on your monitor. And those gleaming penny rounds look pretty darn lip-smacking. Yes, I just used that adjective. The penny tile does that to me.
So here are some close ups so you can get a better idea of what it looks like in real life. Thankfully even when you enter the room from the frame hallway on the far side of the kitchen you can easily make out each individual penny tile. Which is nice because it would have been a colossal bummer to spend 14 hours tiling the room only to have it look like gray paint from afar. Even from the front door it clearly looks like little round penny tile on the part under the microwave that you can see from there. Whew.
This shot is probably best at depicting all the varying tones in the tile. It’s awesomely random. Some tiles are a bit darker and some have a dark ring (or semi-ring) around them – we think it looks really charming and adds to the dimension. And you can see the polished shine on the top right corner of this shot (they look hazy in this pic for some reason, but up at the corner you can see that they gleam in real life). It’s actually a really “marble-ish” look without having to dish out the money for marble.
Here’s another close up to show how some tiles have darker rings and varied coloring. And you can really see how the grout cleans things up and adds some nice tone-on-tone action where dark holes and mesh once were:
We were a little nervous about the grouting step because we had heard that it can accentuate any seams or inconsistencies in the way that you laid the sheets. But our experience was the opposite: it actually seemed to disguise those little mistakes. It’s probably because our tile / grout color combo is low contrast, but if it was dark it could highlight those flaws instead of bridging the gap and making things look more finished and even. So this isn’t to say that grout solves a bad tile job when it’s low contrast (unfortunately nothing solves a bad tile job) but if there are tiny inconsistencies, similarly toned grout might be your best friend. And thanks to using a good sealer, it shouldn’t be a bear to keep clean (we used something awesome on our first house’s tiled shower and didn’t have to scrub it ever again – even while hosting Open Houses a year later it looked as good as it did the day we grouted).
Here’s a better shot that shows the shine- although it’s only on that portion of tile on either side of the range hood. I blame our terrible kitchen lighting, but it’s next on our to-do list! Yes, we have an appointment with our electrician and everything.
Speaking of other still-to-be-completed projects, we also still have to add a range hood and some open shelves. We think our tile will be a pretty darn sexy backdrop for our dishware and such (knowing Sherry, there will be a whole lot of “and such” up there with our dishes – the girl has plans).
Even though grout is done, our job with the tile isn’t 100% complete. We still have to seal it. And before that we have to do a bit more clean up (aka: more buffing to remove small traces of haze in some areas). It’s pretty common for grout jobs and The Tile Shop actually sells haze remover, but we’ve found that just good ol’ fashioned elbow grease (and a dry dishtowel) can also do the trick. Buff, buff, buff. So we may try that first. That is, once our wrists recover.
You know we’ll be back to share all the goods as we go (applying our sealer, planning/replacing the lighting, range hood happenings, open shelves, new cork floors, etc). In the meantime, have you guys ever grouted? Did you kind of like it (me) or kind of hate it (Sherry). The good news is that we both admitted that it was totally worth the hassle when we were done, so that’s unanimous. Glad to have it checked off.
Psst- Take a wild guess who is the most excited indoor train rider in our family. Might not be who you think. More on that here.
