Stained Glass Tiling

Well, I said I would share some of my solutions to problems I’ve run up against so, here goes.

When we were doing our renovation, we bought our supplies as we went. We were actually doing our renovation, not just signing the checks. As a result, our renovation moved along at a rather pedestrian pace. One of the first rooms we finished in the addition of our house was the ensuite bath. Our ensuite is a modest three piece washroom split into two areas. One is the sink and toilet and the other, at the end of our closet is the shower. The addition at this point is only 12 ft. wide so some very creative solutions to entries and hallways had to be devised.

As it turned out, we bought some 1” porcelain mosaic tile in white from Home Depot to trim out the top of the plain 6” square white ceramic tile in the sink area. Although, we have no intention of selling the house anytime in the near future, we tried to keep things neutral in the more permanent elements.

The shower area, though functional, didn’t get tiled until some 8 to 9 months later. When we went to get the same 1” tiles from Home Depot, lo and behold, they didn’t sell them anymore. We could have ordered them and waited 7 weeks, but I was ready to go. When you do this stuff yourself, you do it when you’ve gathered up the gumption to do it. Waiting was not an option. What to do?

Although they didn’t have the 1” tiles, they did have 2” tiles in the same colour and more or less same price. We still had a very small number of the 1” tiles left. I wanted a little bit of sparkle on the wall and went to a stained glass store and picked up some very heavily textured mirrored glass. I cut the glass into uniform squares using my Morton jig and voila, this is what I came up with.
Everyone always tells us how much they like the results.














It’s the perfect combination between neutral and a little bit of special.

I put in one band at about the half way point and one that runs at the level of the top of the shower stall. All the tiles were applied with white thinset.