Picking up from my last post, I continued the subway tiles until I reached the bottom of the cabinets. My kitbashed cabinets aren’t quite square and there’s a bigger gap under the right cabinet than the left.

I thought maybe I could shove the cabinet bottoms up against the top edge of the tiles, but they’re noticeably crooked.

Here’s how it looks with the tiles level under the cabinets. You can’t see the gap from this angle, but I still need to hide it somehow.

Anyway, I continued to tile up into the hood area.

Here they are mostly done. After this, I removed the tape and moved the cabinets so I’d have space to get the final half tiles in at the edges.

With all the tiles laid down, I used a toothpick to coat each one with Cameo Ivory Gallery Glass paint.

Here’s how that looks. Now I needed to cover up the gaps where the tiles don’t exactly reach the edges of the cabinets.

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This post has been a long time coming. I’ve been puttering around on the Mansard Victorian’s kitchen backsplash ever since I finished the countertop in January.

First I glued in the kitchen wallpaper. I prepared this scrapbook paper last fall when I started the kitchen (yikes, has it been that long?) but then I put it aside because I wasn’t sure if plain white was the way to go.

But with the cabinets finished and providing a lot of color to the room, I decided the white would work. To be fair, I also didn’t feel like cutting out more wallpaper.

The upper cabinets were an extremely tight fit — so much so that I couldn’t get them in and out of the house in one piece. But I needed them to be one piece in order to fill in the cracks between the three units.

I carefully sanded the edges of the cabinets on the disc sander until I was able to glue them together and still slide them in and out of the house. In order to do this, I need to slide them in horizontally, close to the ceiling, and then ease them down the wall. I won’t be able to do this once a ceiling light and trim on the bump-out opening are installed. (Luckily I realized this before I glued those in!)

Once the cabinets were glued together, I added wood filler to the cracks, and then painted over them.

Now on to the backsplash. Like in the inspiration picture, I envisioned a white subway tile backsplash with black trim.

This Fiskars punch makes 1/4″ x 1/8″ tiles.

I laid the cabinets on a piece of scrapbook paper to trace the backsplash area.

Then I started gluing on the tiles.

I didn’t like a few things about this first attempt. I thought I centered my initial tiles, but apparently not, because I ended up with a tiny piece of tile at the left side of the second row where there should have been a full tile. And the fourth row didn’t quite line up with the border, which would have caused too big a gap between that row and the next one.

It’s on the right track, but wanted to start over and do a neater job.

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