Painting a Tile Backsplash

December 1, 2014 by Ruthie 6 Comments

When my husband and I bought our house our kitchen was fairly updated.  It had granite counter tops, new laminate flooring, and a tile backsplash.  It wasn’t that bad of a kitchen but I knew that I wanted to do little things to update it a bit.

(previous owners furniture)

After a lot of convincing my husband and lots of research, I decided to start by painting the tile.  We couldn’t afford a whole new backsplash so we figured we could make a small change and if we hated it we could eventually replace the backsplash.  Thankfully, we ended up loving it and have no plans to replace it at this point.  I got the idea of painting the backsplash from 11 Magnolia Lane’s Blog from a pin on Pinterest.  It was a small budgeted tile transformation that we loved!

11 Magnolia Lane’s blog said she didn’t sand the tiles before priming them so I did the same.  The tiles already had a fairly rough ceramic finish so I thought it would be alright to skip the sanding step.  I decided to use a primer that worked well with tough to paint surfaces.  I used XIM Primer in white.  We didn’t like the dark brown tiles but we did like the small strip of multi-colored tiles so we decided to paint around them.  We taped over the small tiles and it did end up leaking so we used a razor blade to scrape off the excess paint.  When we painted the top color on the tile we ended up free handing it so we could ensure it wouldn’t leak.

I am in love with the color Accessible Beige by Sherwin Williams so I was certain that it was the color I wanted to paint the tiles.  While my husband was working late one night I went to town and started painting the top coat.  After doing half of the kitchen I was pretty sure that it wasn’t the right color.  (Although it has been the perfect color for other projects in my home).  I thought it made the kitchen look dated and it didn’t do much for me.  We were originally trying to lighten up the room but that color was a no go.

(Accessible Beige, excuse the mess)

I was talking with my mom and she suggested going to a darker gray.  After we finished painting the tile we knew we were going to paint the room Requisite Gray by Sherwin Williams so we wanted to stay within that gray family.  I grabbed the paint swatch and held it up next to the small tiles.  The color Backdrop, which was two shades darker, blended really well so the next day I went and bought the paint.  I used Sherwin Williams ProClassic Interior Oil-Based Semi-Gloss paint.

This time around my husband helped me paint the tiles and we were done in about an hour.  We let it dry for about 24 hours and the next night we applied a second coat.  We did not use a polyurethane top coat but haven’t really had a problem.  There are two spots that have chipped because a kitchen item rubbed up against it and scratched the paint.  Otherwise, it has held up great with all normal uses of a kitchen.

Last but not least we were trying to decide if we wanted the switch plates to blend or if we wanted to use stainless steel plates as we have in other areas of our house.  We painted the wall plates but it just didn’t have the effect we were looking for.

I couldn’t be happier with the final product!!  The color was perfect!  Not only did it match the smaller tiles but it really made the gray in our countertops stand out.  It was a fairly easy way to upgrade our kitchen in an affordable way.  I have lots more little projects to do in the kitchen, which will be up on the blog fairly soon!

What a huge difference, huh?!