Friday, December 16, 2011

Making glass flexible

So a big part of my plan to fix up the Winnie is putting glass tile in the kitchen and bath.

I found this stuff at Lowes:

The two colors go really well together. I cut them and meshed them in a grid pattern:


With the greens, blues and golds all together it looks amazing in person. The next step is figuring out how to get glass tile to adhere on the motor homes walls.  Traditional tile setting techniques won't work. Mortar and grout are rigid. Motorhomes flex and move. They go through temperature extremes. I have read many blog and forum entries that say the ceramic tiles pop off if you try to go the traditional route. Makes sense and I figure these tiny glass ones would, too.

I can figure this out. After spending another couple hours wandering around in Lowes (They don't even pay attention to me anymore) I looked at many, many products. Flexible grout seems like the ticket, maybe with some Liquid Nails to glue it to the walls? Sanded grout scratches the glass. Hmm, perhaps glue the whole sheet together with a backing of flexible vinyl white caulk - then glue that to the wall?

On the right is one right side up and 'grouted' with caulk. The left one is face-down and caulk is coated over the back, once dry I will turn it over and fill in the cracks between tiles. In theory this will make a flexible 'mat' of glass tiles I can then glue to the wall. The white caulk is so it doesn't muddy the colors of the tile. Experimentation showed that this makes a huge difference with the translucent tiles being nice and bright. Too bad since the flexi-caulk comes in a multitude of nice colors. Wonder if I could put the white behind and then use the sand color in the grout lines? Maybe that would not muddy the colors?

Back to Lowes.....

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