kitchen backsplash subway tile design ideas
hi i'm craig philips and welcome to tilingtrade tips where i'm going to be revealing my top diysecrets to help you save money and time. on this episode i'm going to be showing you how to lay wall tiles onto a kitchen splashback with a brickwork effect. now there's a variety of different size, styleand shape tiles you can use to do your splashback. this particularly one is a rectangular shape,it's one of my favourites 300mm in length by a 100mm deep. now it's very important where you place thisfirst tile because that dictates
where the rest of them are going to go on the area. so what i do is start off by measuring thefull length of the area that you want to tile and find the centre point of that. that's 3m, so i'm going to put a mark on thewall at 1.5. then i'm just going to place these tiles,starting from that centre point working their way out from left to right. this is so we can see what size cut we'regoing to have each end. now as you can see from there, starting fromthe centre working my way out i've already got a little small cut across there so
i'm going to move one tile across so it'shalf way in the centre of the mark and then slide all them across to the tile. you can already see now, we're going to endup with a good size cut now that's going to be mirrored on the oppositeside of-course but with us fixing these on a kind of a brickworkeffect, what we need to do is also place this second course staggering the joint about50%. just laying onto the work surface at first that's going to mirror what you're going to see on the back wall. now if we stagger these joints to create thatbrickwork effect
again working your way down to the one side it's going to give you the indication of whatsize cut your going to have along here. now this is what can happen, we can also havea small slither cut there which is what we don't want. so now we have to move the tile again. we started off by having the end of the tilein the centre of the wall, that didn't work then we moved it and straddled it 50 50, thatstill didn't work when we put the second course on so what we have to do now is move it along again so just 25% of the tile is over the half way point
and the other 75% of the tile is going the other way. so now you're happy with the position of thetiles and you've got equal cuts on both ends on both courses. you just need to get your marker and put alittle mark on the work surface itself. now you can start spreading your adhesiveand fix the tiles. now once we've paste out the tiles and markedup the wall we're ready to start applying the adhesive. this is pre-mixed wall tile adhesive, usingthe straight edge of the trowel we started to spread this on nice and even. then we turn the trowel around using the notchededge and combed it through.
this creates a nice even layer of adhesive. now apply the first tile onto the adhesive,making sure it's in line with the mark you made earlier. applying an equal amount of pressure on all4 corners. once you're happy that it set into position,get two tile spacers slide them underneath to create the gap. now on your second course, you're going toneed to line up the centre of the tile over the joint below. now when you're creating a brick effect with your tiles, whether it's a rectangle or a square tile you're going to have to use a t-tile spacer. now once you've completed one section of yoursplashback
you may find you want to continue it aroundthe corner. there's two ways of doing this, you can measureup and mark out like you did with the first wall or you can use the off cuts of all your cornercuts and continue them around the corner which i think looks a lot better. now you've set all your wall tiles into position. get yourself a damp sponge and wipe any excessadhesive before it dries. now by following a few basic tiling tips, it really is simple to achieve a great splashback like this one. i hope you've enjoyed watching my tiling tradetips. if you want to watch any further tiling tips
maybe order some free tile samples or just enquire about the vast range of productsthat tile mountain stock please visit the website tilemountain.co.uk