The Kitchen Backsplash,
start to finish.

A backsplash is eighteen inches of wall between your counter and your cabinets, which works out to twenty or thirty square feet in most Middle Tennessee kitchens. It is the smallest tile job we take. It is also the one homeowners notice every single day, because it sits at eye level in front of you while you stand at the sink.

Most of a kitchen refresh costs real money. This one does not, and it lands harder than new hardware or paint.

Two days, and what happens in them

Day one is prep, and prep is most of the job. Outlet covers and the old backsplash come off. The wall gets skimmed and flattened, because a backsplash sits in raking light from an under-cabinet fixture and every hump in the drywall will show as a shadow line across the tile. Then we set.

Day two is grout, silicone, and putting your kitchen back. Outlets get their spacers and covers, the counter joint gets color-matched silicone rather than grout so the two materials can move against each other, and we clean.

You lose the use of the counter for those two days. The sink and the range stay live except for short stretches.

The four decisions that matter

The stopping point

Behind the range, a backsplash that runs to the underside of the hood reads as intentional. One that stops at cabinet height and leaves a stripe of paint above it reads as a budget decision. Full height behind the range and standard height elsewhere is the combination we build most.

The counter joint

Tile should never sit hard on a countertop with grout in the seam. Silicone in that joint, matched to the grout color, is what keeps a hairline crack from opening across the whole run the first winter.

Outlets

Cover plates want to land flat on tile, which means the boxes get extended before we set, not after. Planning the pattern around outlet locations is why our layouts do not put a two-inch sliver of tile beside a switch.

The pattern, and where it starts

A herringbone or a stacked pattern needs a centerline chosen before the first tile goes on, set on the range or the sink rather than a corner. Starting from a corner is how a run ends with a cut sliver in the most visible spot in the kitchen.

The cost

We quote backsplashes as part of a fixed price after we measure, because square footage, tile size, and pattern move the number more than anything we could put in a blog post. Tile you supply, tile we source, a straight subway run, a mitered edge return: all of it changes the job.

The number on the quote stays the number you pay.

Backsplashes are tile work, and tile is the whole company. Same waterproofing habits, same 1/16-inch grout lines, same color-matched silicone. It is a two-day version of what we do in showers. See the rest on the kitchen remodeling page.