When we first moved into the house our countertops were beige, our accent tile behind our stovetops were a horrid brown that were falling off and only glued on, and our cabinets were 1980s nightmares. This was the first part of the house I wanted to work on since I loved being in the kitchen. Thankfully my daughter helped me with this process.
The first thing I did was remove the glue on tile with my daughter. The glue on tile left plenty of glue residue stuck to the tile that was hidden behind it, imagine white tiles with blue flowers scattered around your kitchen while also being covered in brown, disgusting glue. Once we scrubbed the glue clean we began the task of painting them. We removed the glue with sponges and nail polish remover that was 100% acetone. Me and my daughter went through several bottles of nail polish remover before we even got halfway done. Eric had to buy us more every time he came home from work. lol.
I did a ton of research on this and went to plenty of hardware stores where they all told me, "You cant paint tile! That cant be done." Alas after researching how people paint cars I discovered how to paint my tiles. After all, the tiles had to be heat resistant so it wouldn't start a fire from either the oven or the stove top.
We had to tape the walls to not get our paint everywhere. We used 3M painters tape. Then we painted the crevices in the tiles with Kilz paint to ensure that any bacteria couldn't get in. After the Kilz crevices we did one layer of Kilz paint over all of the tiles for a nice even basecoat to work with. We then re-taped and painted the top half of our tiles white and the bottom half a light sage green with multiple coats of paint. We allowed that to dry for a day, un-taped everything again, and lightly dusted, since we live in Wyoming. Then we painted over it with Rust-Oleum Heat Resistant Coating, Aluminum because it can withstand up to 800 degrees of heat.
It was a long process that took around a week due to the tile cleaning, but the outcome was more than worth it. We couldn't wait to keep working on our kitchen!
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