Glass Subway Tile Back Splash in our Calgary Kitchen

Hi everyone! I find myself thinking about my kitchen back in Calgary as I start to plan our kitchen renovation here in Stittsville. The back splash was one of my favorite parts of our kitchen in Calgary. Our original back splash was very dark grey tile and almost the same colour as the floor tile. This is a picture of our before kitchen.

I couldn’t stand our dark back splash, it just made the kitchen look too dark. We finally decided to remove it which was not an easy job! You can’t just remove the tile because, as we discovered, all of the drywall comes off with it. This means we had to remove all of the drywall as well. We started removing the tile on a snowy day in April. Yes I said April. This was Calgary after all. Here is a picture of our son Ben in the snow that day. He needed to lie down because he just couldn’t take it anymore.

Here is a picture of my wonderful husband Kevin getting to work.

Here is a picture of what we were left with. Sort of.

We then cleaned up the mess and installed the new drywall. I realized that I didn’t want to install any back splash just yet because my dream kitchen included granite counter tops. The plan was to install the granite counter tops before installing the back splash so we wouldn’t have to go through this process again! Granite was not in the budget just yet so I ended up painting the back splash the same colour as the kitchen walls. We lived like the picture below for a few years until we could afford granite. Not great but not horrible either. It was definitely better than the dark back splash we had before. You can also see that I started painting the cabinets. Sorry the picture quality is not the best.

The granite counter tops were finally installed after a few years. We don’t move fast I know. You can check out my painted kitchen here.  I was so excited to finally be able choose the back splash tile. Oh the choices that are out there! So hard to choose. The first picture below shows the final two choices. A larger, darker one on the left and the lighter, smaller tile on the right. In the end I went with the smaller glass subway tile on the right. It was a greenish grey called Arctic Fog. I loved it!

This was the final choice. Arctic Fog glass subway tile.

This was the first time I had ever done any tile work. I did all of the measuring and installing while Kevin was out in the cold doing a great job with the wet saw. Surprisingly I quite enjoyed it and I think I was pretty good at it! Here is a picture of my installation process.

Dont forget to use those little spacers!

The end result was amazing! Look at that sparkle. It was like jewelery for my kitchen!

I was a little nervous about installing the backs splash ourselves but it turned out great! I might even use the same tile in my new kitchen. Stay tuned!

Thanks for stopping by!

Karla