'Tiled' Kitchen Backsplash

It's time to finally share the home improvement project that took me most of the summer to complete.  It wasn't a difficult task, it just took forever to finish, but more about that later...

Behold, the new kitchen backsplash:

When we moved in last year, the backsplash was painted white - nothing special.  I knew I wanted to do something, but there are SO many choices.  I finally decided on a stencil and paint because it's not permanent and if I hated it all I needed to do was paint over it!  I chose this stencil...

...and then chose a shade of blue called 'Peaceful River' since blue is my favorite color.  I bought a sample can of paint and had more than enough.  The entire backsplash was painted with a stencil brush.  I know lots of people use a foam roller, but, honestly, in my opinion, there is always bleeding of paint with that method.  That may be part of the reason why this project took all summer.  But, I'll get to that later.. because there was prep work in the name of old caulk:

As you can see, it was thick, it pulled off part of the sheetrock coating, and there was a lot of it!

I fought the caulk and I don't know who won!

After patching and repainting the backsplash, I was ready to stencil.  I started at the bottom and after the third 'tile' I realized my shoulder was starting to ache.  Let's just say reaching across the counter and bending wasn't the best thing for me.  So I took a break.  The maximum number of tiles stenciled in a row was 5 before my shoulder screamed for me to stop.  As I moved up and was working under the cabinets, my neck and vertigo had something to say.  At one point I was on my stomach, on the counter with one foot on the floor.  Thankfully, there are no photos of that (although my husband was tempted), but the amount of time I could work under the cabinets was limited.  I was then averaging 3 tiles done before needing a break. To be honest, there were moments when I asked myself why I started this project.

In spite of it all, things were going along just fine until I had to get into corners around the shelf over the sink and under the stove hood.  There was no way this stencil was going to bend the way I needed:

Time to get creative!

Since I didn't want to cut up the stencil, I pulled out a piece of cardstock and traced the stencil on it.  Then, with an exacto knife, I proceeded to cut out the stencil on the cardstock.

It was far from perfect, but I didn't mind cutting this one up to fit in those corners.

By the time I was done, this is what the cardstock stencil looked like:

I sure made a mess of it!

This pic shows how those corners turned out:

Just one more shot:

So, there are 3 questions:

1.  Is it perfect?  No

2.  Am I going to show you my mistakes? No, although you may spot a few in the photos.

3.  Would I do it again? No.  

If I was younger and didn't have vertigo and neck/shoulder issues, I'd probably do it again.  

I will say I absolutely love the look and the color.  My next project is finding fabric to match for curtains.  That will be the perfect project for when the weather turns cooler and I can't work on other projects outside.   
Thank you so much for stopping by.  I hope you'll be back soon since my fall projects will be coming up soon!

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