Gnarfle.com Just gnarfle it.

Recently, for some crazy reason, we've decided to fix up our kitchen. Granted, it would probably be smarter to finish the basement first seeing as we started that over a year ago and it's sat without drywall for the past 11 months, but hey, we got kitchen envy after visiting the in laws. Our project started simply, after admiring the nice vinyl sheet flooring that my sister in law has in their home. Now our kitchen floor is about as bad as it gets. It's cheap, it's white and it has a dimpled texture that traps dirt. Basically, seeing as it's white and has dirt pockets built in, it never looks clean. Whoever thought white flooring was a good idea is an idiot, but I digress. So we started looking into getting some nice vinyl put in our kitchen, and we came to the conclusion that for what it would cost to have someone put in nice vinyl flooring that kinda looked like tile, we could actually install tile ourselves. Hmmmm.... We worked up a budget for the tax refund and realized that we could do tile pretty cheap, plus we'd have enough left over to install an island. Yay!

Of course, this got us to thinking, with nice flooring and a butcherblock island in our kitchen, our el cheapo laminate countertop is going to look pretty bad. We figured we might as well tile that too... Since our cabinets had to be ordered, we tackled the counters first since the flooring is best done after installing the island. A quick, sore weekend later, we have a new counter. Mostly... The backsplash has yet to be completed, but otherwise it's done and looking good.

Here is our kitchen now, not the best lighting, but hey...

Our first step was to remove the existing counter. We briefly contemplated just tiling over it, but we scrapped that idea quickly after noticing that it seemed to be sagging in one corner and that you could actually just lift most of it up without any effort. Removing the counter was pretty easy considering that it was held in with only 5 screws... That's 2 screws on a small 1' section, 3 screws on a 12' L shaped section, and 0 screws on a 3' section. Once the counter was out, we found a few surprises that made me glad we decided to start from scratch.

This is the corner with a lazy susan cabinet. You may notice those brown things on the wall and assume they are there to support the countertop. Indeed, that seems to be the idea. What you may not be able to tell from this picture is that those are actually two pieces of baseboard trim, about 1/2" thick, held in place with 2 finishing nails each driven into drywall. You also cannot see the level lines drawn on the wall, which the two trim pieces do not follow at all, either because whoever nailed them just didn't give a damn, or they've sunk down over the years seeing as they're not actually securely fastened to anything. Obviously, this explains why the corner has sagged over the years...

This one I like to call "we forgot the shims. oh well." Why bother shimming behind the cabinets when you can just go ahead and drive a few screws in there and bend the cabinet back against the wall. Makes sense to me.

I ripped those out and put in some 2x3's, screwed into actual studs, to give some real support. I also put another one behind the dishwasher, and put a few on the back of the cabinet by the sink for extra support. Next up, we put down a layer of 3/4" plywood.

This was screwed in to every cabinet in 4 corners, into all of the extra supports I installed, and into the front of the cabinet near the sink for extra support. I managed to screw into the cabinet frame without splitting it or otherwise damaging them, which I'm quite proud of... On top of this we put a layer of 5/8" plywood, overlapping the seams of the first layer. The top layer was held down with a large number of screws and gave a SOLID counter. I managed to cut out a perfect sink hole on my first try with my trusty $20 harbor freight jigsaw, and after attaching some 1x2's to the front and side edges, we were in business.

I'm really glad we did all this prep, our countertop is now solid as a rock and should be up to the task of supporting tile for years to come. Next up, we began laying down the Schluter Ditra underlayment.

This stuff is an underlayment designed for tile. It's probably overkill for the countertop, but since we're using it for the floor, we figured we might as well use it on the counter as well. The big consideration here was that ditra is a lot easier to work with than cement backerboard/hardiboard/etc. You just cut it with scissors and you're done. Essentially what it does is float the tile above the underlying surface, so that any movement in the underlying wood or floor or counter deforms the ditra rather than the tile. This helps prevent tiles from popping and grout from cracking. It costs about twice as much as backerboard, but it's a lot easier to install and has a great reputation for keeping your tiles intact.

The ditra is installed by putting down a layer of latex modified thinset with a 1/4" V-notched trowel, and then you just press the cut piece of ditra right on top of that. We bought a thinset mixer, but it didn't fit our drill, so we resorted to the stir it with a stick method which worked reasonably well. There's a surprisingly small amount of water required to go from 'almost thick enough' to 'way too thin', but we got the hang of it quickly. We mixed it up to the consistency of peanut butter, spread it out and slapped down the ditra.

After that was down, it was time to start tiling. We started with the edge pieces, all of which we had to cut on our nice $88 lowes tile saw. It worked fine, but it was extremely messy and required frequent water additions.

We scooped on some more latex modified thinset with a 1/4" square notched trowel and stuck the cut tile pieces on. They held in place pretty well and within 30 minutes were pretty well set. We didn't put ditra on the front, I'm not sure if we were supposed to or not. After all the front and side pieces were on, we started putting down the main tile. This time we used an unmodified standard thinset, since that's what Schluter says to use on top of the ditra. Plus it's cheaper. We troweled that on and stuck the tiles down. They set up pretty quickly.

Our tiles had built in little spacers, but they seemed to be different on each one. Regardless, we ended up with reasonably straight grout lines, with fairly small gaps. It was hard to get them level, but they're close and now that it's grouted, you don't notice the raised ones too much... We put bullnose pieces on the front to give a nice edge, since they were much cheaper than the actual bullnose tile trim pieces which we couldn't find for our tile anyway.

After this was all done, we struck a major problem as we tried to push the stove back in. It didn't fit. Oops. And trying to get it to fit knocked several tiles off. Not so good. We went to bed thinking we'd just leave the tiles off of the inside edge on one side, but the next morning we realized it would be too visible. We had popped all the tiles off the side by the stove and I formulated my plan of attack. First, I would try to cut through the counter top and ditra to shave off a bit of the counter so that the stove would fit. If that didn't work, then we'd take it all off and start over. This section was a small 1' endcap so it wasn't too big of a deal. Luckily the circular saw worked great, I got the depth of the blade set just right so it cut through the counter and not into the cabinet below, and since I was only shaving off a little bit there were no screws in the way. We tiled it back up and slid the stove right in. It's still a tight fit, but it fits!

The next day we moved on to grouting. We choose a non sanded grout in a similar color to the tile. I got the hang of it pretty quickly and it didn't take long to grout everything. To work the grout in, just put a big blob on the counter and spread it around using the float at a low angle (nearly flat). Work it all over making sure it gets into all the cracks. To wipe it off, just scrape the float over the tile at an angle to the grout lines with the float at nearly a 90 degree angle to the tile. The only problem I found is that if you leave a thin layer on the tile for more than 30 seconds, it sets up and is hard to scrape off, leaving you with little chunks all over, but everything came up nicely with the sponge.

After 20 minutes we went over it with a well wrung out sponge and removed some of the excess while smoothing out the grout lines a bit. It was pretty easy and didn't require a careful touch as I would have thought.

After everything was grouted, we reinstalled the sink and wiped the counter down a bit more, completing our countertop.

Overall, it looks fantastic. We need to complete the backsplash which will really make things look nice, but I'm really pleased with how it all turned out. Total cost, including the backsplash, is around $800 for roughly 40 square feet over countertop. Not cheap, but a lot cheaper than the alternatives...