Cement Tile and Tin Ceiling Tile Backsplash in my Gray and White Kitchen

I’ve been meaning to post pictures of my Cement tile backsplash that I put in the kitchen for a while now but I realized after I took the pictures that the setting on my camera to blur the background was on, darn!  So I’m going to post what I have for now and replace them as soon as my kitchen get perfectly clean again….sigh….

Anyway,  It took about 3 months to get our handmade cement tile from Mexico and it cost in the $600 range give or take, I can’t remember exactly.  But first an overview of the entire kitchen:

(Check out my tutorial on how to make those DIY pendant lights for $30 each plus some lamp parts)

We have white cabinets around the exterior of the kitchen and the island is stained dark gray, called Graphite, from Marsh Cabinets.  They also had a light painted gray cabinet which was beautiful too, but I went with the darker cabinets to hide some of the dirt from kids.  I have to admit I was worried to do white cabinets.  I was worried that they would need to be wiped down every day to keep them looking clean, like our last house, but I haven’t had to do that at all.  Our entire cabinet costs came to $4700 for the white cabinets and $2000 for the island and I’m pretty sure that included installation because they installed them and we didn’t pay them anything else, but maybe our builder did…hmmm…never thought to ask.  I know he had $1500 budgeted for installation, so maybe labor is not included.  We could have done cheaper cabinets but still good quality but I was really stuck on the gray shaker cabinets and it’s a newer color so a lot of places don’t have it.

Our White Oak floors are stained Dark Walnut with a Satin finish, in case you were wondering.  It’s a great color, not too light or too dark.   It doesn’t show a lot of dirt which is what I was worried about.

The granite is Glacier White which cost $3200 for I think 68 sq ft.  It was one of the lower priced granite and the lowest price I could find and get something that kind of resembled carrara marble, which I love, but would never want to deal with the maintenance of it.  We had the granite installers hone it offsite for $300 and I LOVE it.  The only thing I would do differently is make sure they seal it after honing  because they sanded the sealer off that came from the manufacturer.  I had to seal it several times myself after I noticed that stains didn’t seem to be coming up.  Now there isn’t a problem as long as you don’t leave dirty pots and pans in particular carbon steel woks that rust :)  But on the positive note, stains can be sanded out since it’s not shiny :+)

Do you like my lights?  I made those from some $40 lanterns I bought from Hobby Lobby and lamp parts that Lowes carries.

Over the stove is a metal backsplash made from 3 different types of tin ceiling tiles/trim.  See my tutorial on how to make a metal ceiling tile backsplash focal point.  I wasn’t planning on doing that but  I came up short on cement tiles and had to figure out something else.  I learned that cement tiles are a bit different than other tiles.  With other tiles if you cut it in half to put somewhere, then you can use the other half somewhere else.  Not so with cement tile, because of the pattern.  The only tiles I could use again were the ones going up the side of the tin ceiling back splash part.  There were even some tiles that I just used a sliver of and couldn’t reuse the other piece  However, I think it ended up better because I love the rustic tin ceiling tile backsplash.

Anyway, here are some more pictures of the cement tile, which I had to seal several times too but now it can be wiped off and not stain.

Don’t you just LOVE cement tile??  I ordered it from aventetile.com and it’s called Mission Zebra B.  I checked almost all the cement tile websites after trying to find it in stores and Avente Tile was the cheapest I could find in something I liked that didn’t have a minimum order.  After I finished grouting my 4 year old told me it’s good as long as I don’t put it all over the living room or it’d make him dizzy….tempting….he knows his mother, lol