When your tile is really expensive…

…then it’s important to not screw it up! This post describes the challenges that come with a handmade tile backsplash install. These other blogposts describe how to plan and how to install handmade tile for great results. But if you’re wanting a deep dive into why handmade clay ceramic tile is hard to work with in the first place, then read on for details!

Handmade Tile Basics

Handmade clay ceramic tile is just what it sounds like. It’s clay tile with a ceramic glaze coating that’s made by hand. Major tile manufacturers like Daltile have design lines of pseudo-handcrafted tile. The largest truly handcrafted tile manufactuer is Fireclay Tile. There are lots of other handmade tile options that you can get from upscale tile distributors like The Tile Shop.

Whether truly handcrafted or not, handmade tile is orders of magnitude more expensive than regular mass-produced tile. It’s also designed to have variations in size, thickness, color, and finish from one tile to another. Handcrafted tile has a purposefully irregular look.

This makes handcrafted tile a real challenge to install properly. There’s a very fine line between “charmingly irregular” and “haphazardly sloppy.” Also, you need to be A LOT more careful about managing overage for a handmade tile installation project. Installing a handmade tile backsplash takes a lot more time, patience, and skill than installing simple cheap ceramic does. This is why every major handmade tile maker publishes detailed installation guidelines (and disclaimers).

This is the major challenge to consider for a handmade tile backsplash project. It will be a lot more expensive than a simple ceramic subway tile backsplash install. The tile will be more expensive. The labor will be more expensive. And any screwups will be A LOT more expensive!

This Handmade Project

These particular clients chose some really fancy handmade fireclay tile that featured a translucent ceramic coating and a really cool cracked glaze effect. You can see at a glance that this particular tile had a lot going on:

Sometimes you’ll be working with a less complicated tile that is completely monochromatic, impossible to scratch, and perfectly uniform. Handmade tile is the exact opposite by design. This particular tile was particularly twee though.

In addition to being fragile and easy to scratch, this handmade tile really highlighted the size, shape, and flatness variation issues that can complicate any layout plan.

Handmade Tile Challenge: irregular SIZE

Machine-made ceramic tiles are nearly perfectly uniform. These tiles can be installed with really tight 1/16-in or even nearly nonexistent 1/32-in grout joint widths.

Handmade tile is irregular by design. In addition to variations in size, most handmade tile has purposefully irregular edges that make it impossible to get a completely flush fit between individual tiles. This means you need to jigger the grout gap width from tile to tile in order to maintain overall level grout lines. A really tight 1/16-in or smaller gap simply doesn’t give enough space to compensate for this.

This is why you can’t realistically get tighter than an overall 1/8-in grout width for a handmade tile backsplash installation.

Handmade Tile Challenge: irregular SHAPE

Again, handmade tile is irregular by design. So, individual tiles will also vary in shape. Although these handmade tiles all had an overall 2×8-in size and rectangular shape, they were not uniform.

None of the tiles were perfect rectangles. This is true to some extent for any tile, but especially for handmade ones. You’re simply not going to get perfectly uniform grout line widths with handmade tiles, since lining up any one side to be perfectly level or perpendicular means that three other edges won’t be exactly level or straight.

Handmade Tile Challenge: irregular FLATNESS

This is something that’s often an issue with even mass produced machine-made ceramic tile. Individual tiles are often not completely flat, and long rectangular tiles are usually bowed the most.

All ceramic tile is made by putting a thin porcelain glaze onto a much thicker earthen clay base. When the tile is fired in a kiln, the porcelain melts to form a continuous hard coating and the clay bakes together to make a solid substrate that’s brittle but strong:

Problem is, porcelain and pottery clay heat up and cool down at different rates. This creates a lot of stress at the porcelain/clay boundary as the tile cools. For example, if the porcelain cools and contracts faster than the clay, then the tile will bow upwards as the contracting porcelain pulls at the still hot clay layer underneath. If the clay cools more quickly, then the opposite happens and the tile bows downward.

Tile manufacturers compensate for this by trying to slowly cool their tile batches from the kiln at a very precise rate to balance these different thermodynamic qualities in the two materials. But no industrial-sized oven is perfectly uniform. As a result, any batch of rectangular ceramic tile will have some that are slightly concave and others that are slightly convex.

This is why long skinny rectangular tiles installed in a full subway pattern with tight grout lines often have overhangs and “lippage” that looks really bad.

Rectangular handmade tiles can exaggerate this effect. Also, handmade tiles will straight up vary in thickness. So you need to float individual tiles off the wall to compensate for these irregularities for a flat-ish result. You can’t just put an even thickness of adhesive on the wall and slap up a bunch of tiles. With handmade tile, you need to backbutter each tile individually to prevent ugly lippage.

The Bottom line? Be REALISTIC!

If your backslash tiles all have individual variations in size, shape, and flatness, then how can you possibly make then look mostly uniform all stuck to a wall together? The secret is space. Wider grout lines give more space to vary the placement of each individual tile with respect to all the tiles around it. Wider grout lines also give more space to hide subtle shadows cast by minor lippage.

It also really helps to have realistic expectations for whatever material you’re working with. If you want to use funky cool handmade ceramic tiles for your backsplash, then you can’t expect a perfectly uniform result. For example, a backsplash with perfectly straight and flush 1/16-in grout lines will have to be made from solid porcelain or glass tiles with almost perfectly uniform size, shape, and thickness. On the other hand, backsplash made from funkily varied handmade tiles is going to have some crafty handmade variation in the result.

And, PLAN Carefully!

The overall trick to making a handmade tile backsplash install look good is to make any unavoidable variations in grout thickness or tile flushness look purposeful, not accidental. You can’t just decide on some arbitrary pattern and layout, start slapping tiles on the wall, and expect a great result. Working with complicated tile requires careful planning, extra install time, and lots of skill.

You can check out this post for deep details on how to plan an installation that will take all of these handmade tile complications into consideration. Or, you can skip ahead to this post if you’re just wanting deets on the actual install tips and final result.