I had grand visions for my end-of-year vacation: I was going to catch up on emails, clean the house from top to bottom, watch movies, spend time with Evan and the dogs, and, of course, work on the kitchen renovation. It didn’t really work out that way, though. My flu morphed into bronchitis, and I’ve basically spent the past two weeks being a hermit and coughing. And coughing. And coughing some more. In between coughs, though, I’ve been tiling! Having something to focus on actually helped me to not cough so much (seriously!), and it also kept me from feeling like my vacation was a total waste.

Not bad, yeah? I’m in love with the tile. I know there are people out there who don’t like black grout because it “looks moldy,” but I love how utilitarian and, well, subway-like it looks. It’s also in keeping with the general spirit of a Victorian kitchen. And how about that black hearth?! I don’t know why I didn’t do that years ago. It really turns what has been a difficult architectural feature to work around into something that looks intentional and feels like an important part of the room.

Photo via Kitchen Clarity

This is the photo I always come back to when I think about the kind of renovation work I’m doing. Obviously I’m going for something quite a bit more contemporary, but the key elements—the hearth, the open shelving, the tile work, the free-standing furniture and cabinetry, the colors—are all there. I’m very conscious of the age of my house, and of the fact that I’m not going to be its last resident. My house will outlive me, and while I am by no means a purist when it comes this stuff, I do like to think forward. That’s why I’m tiling all the way down to the baseboard moldings instead of just doing the backsplash area, for example—it’s about the past and the future as much as it is the present.

This weird corner space to the left of the stove has never felt right. I’m going to mount a length of butcherblock counter to fit perfectly there, and underneath will be a built-in dog bed! Bruno usually “sleeps” (that is, he rests with his eyes half-closed while staying just alert enough to scarf down any food items that might fall to the floor) under the counter while I cook, and I think he’ll really appreciate having a warmer, comfier spot to hang out in.

Here’s a tip if you want a nice, crisp caulk line in your corners: PAINTER’S TAPE. It works really well. Just make sure you pull it off immediately after running/smoothing your caulk bead—don’t let the caulk dry first.

I had to take a full-length beauty shot of this corner before we reconnected the sink and covered it all up. Tiling this area took two full days, nine hours of which I spent on that outside corner alone. Since we’re using cheap, off-the-shelf tiles, there aren’t a lot of options in terms of curved tiles and stuff like that, so I had to get creative with trim pieces. I’m really pleased with how it’s looking! I know the details will get lost once the shelving is up and the kitchen is fully stocked and operational, but for now, I’m obsessed with this corner.

Ugh, the refrigerator is such a behemoth. I really want to get that cute little black Smeg. A smaller fridge could be moved to the wall opposite the stove, making room for the “island” to actually become a true ISLAND. The refrigerator we have is quite nice looking, but it’s really too big for the space. It’s the kind of thing that would look much better in a row of cabinets instead of just floating in the middle of the room.

Our dishes, tools and tiling supplies are hanging out over here for now. Once we put shelving up this stuff can all be put away, and all of the food that’s currently living on the dining room floor can go in the pantry. I’m trying very hard to keep the kitchen as functional as possible while this renovation is going on. At least we were able to reconnect the sink yesterday! I’m not sure how much longer I could handle washing dishes in the bathtub. Every time I took a shower I thought about that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer installs a garbage disposal in his bathtub. Gross!

The back wall and the areas behind the radiators still need to be tiled, but that will have to wait until spring. The radiators are a mess, and we need to have them disconnected and capped before we can do anything. I’m not sure what we’re going to do heating-wise in the kitchen. The radiators are both really badly rusted, the legs are weirdly short and impossible to clean under, one of them doesn’t work at all, and they’re just not nice enough to warrant spending hundreds of dollars having them sandblasted, repaired and powder-coated. I’m guessing they’re only about 50 years old since they don’t have any of the ornamentation of the other cast iron steam radiators in our house. I was hoping we could install Runtal wall panels instead, but they only work with return-pipe systems—we have single-pipe steam heat. Sadface. I dunno. Maybe wall-mounted steam radiators? All I know is that it’s FREEZING in the kitchen, and the current heating situation isn’t working out.

Want to see some progress shots? I’m terrible about stopping to take photos while I’m wrist-deep in grout, but I did take a bunch of Tilestagrams! Here are eight days of tiling condensed into a dozen snapshots. Yay! Tile!

I feel like I’m just going to start every post about the kitchen renovation the same way: These photos are terrible. I’m sorry. The good news is that they make last week’s terrible photos look downright professional by comparison! I was so engrossed in the tile work to bother walking 15 feet to get my camera, and low-light iPhone photos…grain city. Oh well. I threw some adjustment layers, borders and type on them, which I’m pretty sure is the secret to good blog photography. (No?)

It may not look like I got that much done, but I actually tiled for more hours this week than last. There were a lot of cuts to make in the edge tiles! We did finally give in and buy a cheap-o wet tile saw, but it made us feel like we were either going to lose fingers or burn the house down, so we’re sticking with a guillotine-style manual cutter and nippers for now. That takes forever.

As you can see, I’m still avoiding that tricky area around the windowsill. I think I need to get one of those little hand-saws for tile that looks like a coping saw. That’s an actual thing, right? I haven’t seen them at Lowe’s/Home Depot, but I’ll look at a tile store next weekend. There are only a few areas in the room where the cuts are really detailed, so doing them by hand seems reasonable enough. I’d rather cut the tile than under-cut the sill.

The other thing that took F-O-R-E-V-E-R was tiling this little strip of wall between the pantry and the kitchen entryway. The logistics of laying out 6″ tile in a running bond pattern in a 7 ½″ space made my head hurt. I opted to set the whole section off-center to avoid (a) tiny strips of tile on either side, or (b) having some kind of weird centered geometric pattern effect once the dark grout goes in. I think it looks just fine. Please don’t tell me if it doesn’t.

The eagle-eyed obsessives in the audience may have noticed that this little strip is also one row lower than the height of the tile on wall to its left. That’s because of the electrical switch. Call me lazy, but I really don’t want to have to open the wall, deal with a fire stop, move the electrical box and replaster the old hole just for the sake of one row of tile. I’m surprisingly OK with this non-solution.

Aside from updating my tiling progress, I wanted to share my two big renovation rules—both of which I made sure to stick to this weekend.

1. Have a “renovation outfit” that fits you and looks OK.
After seven years of renovating the same house, I can tell you the least motivating thing I face on renovation days is the prospect of having to change into ill-fitting old jeans and a giant t-shirt with a stupid logo on it. Gross clothes make you feel, well, gross. You can roll your eyes all you want, but not feeling hideous while you’re ripping paneling off a wall in a filthy basement goes a long way. You can buy a pair of jeans (Diva skinnies are my go-to jeans for dirty work), a soft t-shirt and a lightweight hoodie from Old Navy for less than $50. You don’t have to worry about them getting dirty or stained, and they’ll last through years of renovation projects. Worth it.

2. Periodically stop and clean up your workspace.
I can’t stress this enough. A messy environment makes for messy work when you’re talking about stuff like tiling and wallpapering, because you’ll be getting thinset and grout and paste and paper scraps all over the place, and chances are good that you’ll wind up ruining something or other as a result. Working in a mess just makes everything so much harder, anyway—you can’t spread out easily when you need to measure something big, and you’re constantly stepping around (or in) debris. I force myself to stop what I’m doing every now and then and clean up. I bag up trash, I move tools I’m done with to their storage spots, I organize screws and nails, I sweep (and vacuum, if necessary) and I wash my hands. It seems like pain to stop in the middle of a project, but again…worth it.

I said I was going to tile, and by golly, I tiled! Oh, what a weekend. I wanted to get these photos up yesterday, but I’m so achy that even editing photos feels like too much. You’ve heard of “tennis elbow”? Well, I have what’s called “tiling thigh.” In both thighs. And my back, and my arms and even my fingers. The last time I tiled anything was the vestibule more than two years ago (!), and I’d forgotten how physically demanding it can be.

These photos are terrible (bad lighting, no tripod, hands covered in thinset), but I figure they’re better than nothing. I don’t understand how some people manage to take great photos of their renovation projects while they’re doing the work?

WOO-HOO, lookit all that glorious subway tile! It feels SO good to do this, pain and all. This is 7 years of procrastination paying off, folks. The cool thing about tiling is that once you do all of the prep work, it goes up reasonably fast. I actually really love tiling. It’s so satisfying, I think because it’s a finite project that usually doesn’t cover too massive an area. It’s methodical. It’s fun. (Really!)

Yeah, this technique I’m showing off here is called “denial and avoidance.” I suck at cutting tiles. Evan is the tile-cutting master in our house, so next weekend I’ll rope him in to cut all of my edge pieces. I think we’re going to have to under-cut the windowsill, though, because I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for a normal human to cut a shape like that out of a 3×6″ ceramic tile.

This is about 6 hours’ worth of tiling (excluding prep work and supply shopping, obviously). I wish I could’ve kept going into the wee hours, but the aforementioned “tiling thigh” was setting in, and I knew I had to quit. Saturday morning I’ll be back at it bright and squirrely, though. (Side note, how horrible is the current lighting in the kitchen? So sad. As is that stupid cellular shade that barely works anymore.)

Tilestagrams! Clockwise from top left: I got my level starting line up the night before I started tiling, and yes, I did use neon pink washi tape to hold my template tiles in place; my trusty Wood & Faulk pencil has seen me through a number of renovation projects; first row up, shimming courtesy of a ripped-up LL Bean catalog; mixing up the first batch of thinset.

I expect my kitchen will look like this for quite a while now. I really need to box up the non-essentials and put them in the basement. It was fun to move this counter to the middle of the kitchen! I can’t wait to have an island. This thing has been shoved up against the wall for far too long.

I took a few last-minute “after-before” photos (THESE are the real “before” photos) before I started taking down shelving. Here’s a last peek at what the kitchen has looked like for the past 7 years—hopefully this slideshow will work…let me know if it’s being weird at all.

• Kitchen Before, corner 1

  http://www.doorsixteen.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/slideshow-gallery/doorsixteen_kitchenbefore1.jpg

• Kitchen Before, corner 4

  http://www.doorsixteen.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/slideshow-gallery/doorsixteen_kitchenbefore4.jpg

• Kitchen Before, corner 2

  http://www.doorsixteen.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/slideshow-gallery/doorsixteen_kitchenbefore2.jpg

• Kitchen Before, corner 3

  http://www.doorsixteen.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/slideshow-gallery/doorsixteen_kitchenbefore3.jpg

• Kitchen Before, refrigerator wall

  http://www.doorsixteen.com/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/slideshow-gallery/doorsixteen_kitchenbefore5.jpg

Some answers to questions I got on Twitter + Instagram:

✚ No, I didn’t ruin my manicure. I wore gloves, silly!

✚ We’re using the same tile we used in the downstairs bathroom. It’s just the basic 3×6″ subway tile from American Olean that you can buy off the shelf at Lowe’s. It costs 22¢ per tile, which is crazy cheap. What you see on the wall so far is about $30 worth of tile.

✚ Most modern subway tiles (including these) don’t require spacers—they’re self-spacing thanks to little ridges on the sides. If you try to use spacers your grout lines will be huge and you will be sad.

✚ We’ll be using black grout.

✚ Yes, I’m tiling directly onto the wall. It’s a plaster wall with flat paint that’s in good shape, and it’s a non-wet area. I patched any dings and sanded it lightly beforehand.

✚ I’m using a non-modified thinset.

✚ I learned to tile by Googling “how to tile” and also by reading posts on the forums at John Bridge.