THE CAVENDER DIARY

We didn’t even know what we wanted..SO we just grabbed one of everything that we thought might work…..

A couple mixed glass mosaics, subway tiles in stainless and cream ceramic, a solid khaki glass square…and some travertine modern looking slim tile, “La Crema Bamboo”  The last one was displayed on a board in the Home Depot parking lot. There were way more tiles, WAY MORE, that we played with in the stores…..these were our top choices.

We threw them all down on top of the new counters, along with a new brushed stainless switch plate cover and some “Fawn” paint chips….

Funny thing, I was leaning towards stainless subway tiles…till I saw it all together…then it was obvious. The travertine won, hands down. In a weird way, it has all the colors of our kitchen in it. The “Mink” counters, “Birch” cabinets, and even the Martha “Fawn” walls…..they’re all in there. AND it looks great with the stainless. Again, it’s way more modern than I would have ever expected our tastes to be, but still kinda Mid-Century.

Y’all may remember that the old backsplash was a little “cough” difficult to remove, and left a few nasty craters in our walls. Jamie sawed and patched drywall all week. ‘Till our walls looked like quilts……

This seemed a heck of a lot easier than replacing all the drywall completely. The jury is still out on that decision.

Did I mention the problem with the tile we picked?

NO?

Ohhh, well there was problem with the tile we picked. ‘Natch….

We were at Home Depot picking up everything we needed for under-cabinet lights and Jamie wanted to just go ahead a buy all the tile we would need. By our completely uneducated guesses, that would be about 40 square feet. ( 20% more than our estimate, which everyone suggests )  Not really that much, even taking tile all the way up the cooktop wall. I thought it was silly to buy it already, we didn’t really need it ’till after my brother and I did all the electrical, which didn’t look like it would be anytime soon.

Remember how H-Depot had piles of our tile in the parking lot only weeks before…..now there was only 2 squares left. We needed 40. This sent Jamie, once again, speeding to outlying H-Depots to collect the 38 more tiles that we needed.

He got it, of course, or this would be a really short post..

Neither of us has ever applied tile before. Everything we know about tiling back splashes we learned from streaming the DIY channel for 12-18 hours every weekend. On Kitchen Crashers it takes the trained team about 3 minutes to do an entire kitchen. When I called my brother Ben to ask how much mastic we would need, he said, “I’ll be right there”.  In about 20 minutes he was pasting up the inaugural tile, and leading the way through the rest of the room.

We managed to get this whole side done before we paused for a steak dinner at my favorite “Plastic Cow” steak restaurant in Dallas. Dunston’s, where the salad bar is nothing but iceberg lettuce, canned beets, and 30-year-old crutons fried in butter. Dunston’s

We managed to finish the other side by midnight.  We started out cutting with tile clippers, but eventually rose clippers became the easiest way to snip the tiles. I know, I know, weird but true. My brothers are both here to constantly remind me how “gay” of a handy-man I really am. But ya know what? The rose clippers worked like a dream.

All those little pieces were a curse and a blessing to cut and piece in. But it was well worth the effort…..In the light of the morning it looked like this.

That yellow cable jutting out of the wall is the power for the seXXXy new vent-a-hood….that comes later.

I know, It looks great!! We love it ……..in almost an unnatural way.