DIY Subway Tile

Hello friends! Happy Saturday!

If you’ve been following along on my husband and I’s DIY basement remodeling, then you’ve seen that we are at the stage of adding backsplash to the kitchen bar area.

I shared a little bit on my Instagram post about how this has really been the first basement project I’ve truly helped my husband out with. To be honest, when my husband initially told me he wanted to finish our basement all on his own, I rolled my eyes at him haha.

I was nervous the project was going to consume too much of his time (and yes it has haha) BUT now 5 months into it I am so thankful he chose to do this and seeing as we are almost at the end I am also thankful for how hardworking he is!

When he first got started, I kinda just let him do his thing in the basement by himself while I would work on projects of my own.

I’ve mostly shared with him my ideas, helped with design, and then given my input where I saw fit. But more recently, I’ve started helping with some things.

And last night we together tackled cutting plain old white subway tile to work on tiling the backsplash for the kitchen bar area. I was actually really excited to start this!

Here’s a picture of what it currently looks like about halfway into it:

We’ve got a couple more feet at the top to go and then over to the left there, but were excited with how it’s coming along.

And here’s what it looked like before we started:

I honestly always thought cutting tile was super hard, it’s really not! When you have the right tools you really can’t mess it up.

We have been using this tool from Home Depot called the Anvil Tile Cutter (can be found if you click here). It made it so easy to do! It cuts a perfect line in the tile. (We had to do a a trial and error the first time to get the hang of it!)

Here is an upclose look at it:

And below is an upclose picture of the steel wheel that scores the tile.

The hardest part of this DIY was cutting around the outlets. I feel like cutting around outlets for any kind of job is alwasy difficult. This is what stalled us on the project.

My husband started out by using a Diamond Grit Jig Saw Blade and honestly I would not recommend this unless you don’t mind using a ton of elbow grease to make the cuts.

As with most DIY’s, we were trying to do this the least expensive route with power tools we already had on hand, so thats why we went with this.

But it resulted in many trial and errors to get a good cut. Thankfully we only had a small handful of awkward cuts to make, but if you have to cut around a lot of outlets or corners, I would highly recommend you borrow a more professional grinder or rent one to do so.

We were in the middle of the project and decided just to go ahead and finish with what we had.

I’m excited for how this is coming along and looking forward to sharing more updates as we finish up this project! 🙂 Please let me know if you have any questions, I’d be happy to share!

Have a great rest of your day!

xoxo Cady