During my recent trip to the Haven Conference, I stopped by my parents’ house and helped them with a couple of DIY projects they have been waiting to tackle.  One of them was upgrading the builder grade backsplash they had in their master bathroom.

The bathroom is beautiful, but my mom wanted to unite the tile work in the shower with the other side of the room.  Since she had pencil tile leftover from the shower construction, we decided we would use it for a new backsplash.

The builder had used originally used the same countertop material as a 4-inch backsplash:

So the first thing we did was removed the old backsplash with a putty knife and a crow bar:

We decided to use tile setting mat to do this project, for the same reasons I did it with my kitchen pencil tile backsplash.

For a detailed tutorial on how to install tile this way, please see my original post.  
We didn’t use the Bondera brand of tile mat this time and I was really disappointed with it.  I would recommend Bondera brand HANDS DOWN. (And no, this isn’t a sponsored post, but not all tile mats are not the same!) 

There were a few obstructions we needed to cut around, but the install was pretty straight forward.

The tile mat method doesn’t require spacers, which is my favorite part of not using thin set:

The most complicated part of the entire install was mitering the trim pieces in the corners:

We used relatively dark grout for this project (which was just matched to the grout in the floor and shower).  Here is what it looked like pre-grouting:
And after (You can barely tell the difference!):You can see the dark lines make each individual tile stand out, more than they did with the lighter color in my kitchen backsplash.

Here are a few more shots of the finished room:


It was really inexpensive transformation (under $100 for all the supplies) and only took one afternoon:
Definitely a great way to get your feet wet with tiling, if haven’t done it before.

Linking up to these parties!