Backsplashes serve several roles; they cover the seam between the wall and your countertops, and they serve as a pretty finish to your kitchen. The process seems simple enough: just pick the tile and stick it on the wall, right? Turns out there are ways to go wrong here as well.
There are a million options. Literally. Materials include glass, ceramic, metals, etc. You can do all one finish, mix them into a design, or buy sheets that already pre-mix coordinated colors for you. You can get the same tile in different sizes and shapes from itty bitty square inchers to footlongs. In terms of final function and appearance, the matter is entirely subjective. Go nuts with your imagination.
The key differences we found were in the consistency of the tiles themselves and the ease (or lack thereof) of installation. We went with square foot sheets of 1x2 inch arctic ice glass tiles, arranged in the classic subway configuration (horizontal, each row half offset from the one above and below it). The sheets are constructed by pre-setting the many small tiles onto a mesh backing so that they can be mortared and placed on the wall in easy-to-apply large sections (as opposed to carefully aligning each tiny tile by hand!). As such, we were surprised to come home and find that an entire wall's worth of tile had been installed and looked completely uneven: wavy with inconsistent gaps, and in some cases tiles had run into each other or were pretty far from horizontal. Upon talking with our tiler, we found out that our tile choice from Home Depot was basically as cheap as possible and presented many installation difficulties: the backing itself was wavy/flimsy so it didn't help enforce the gaps in the tiles, and it tended to detach from the tiles when wet, meaning cutting the sheets with a wet saw (standard tiling tool) wasn't really an option. We also noticed that some of the sheets of tile had a noticeably different color when compared head-to-head (probably from a different batch and control between batches seemed not to be super tight).
The tile that was already up had to be removed, and a new pain-in-the-ass installation approach was utilized: the sheets were cut into 1-inch strips that were mounted one at a time, and stiff spacers had to be cut from thin strips of wood to help align the next row of tiles. A job that should have taken 1 day is now turning into a 3-day effort. I feel bad for the tiler. In the future, we'd go and buy something with a higher assembly and consistency quality to help the tiler do a great job (or even more so if we were doing it ourselves).
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