Tile Countertop Repair

LESLIE: Jess in Washington needs some help with a tile countertop. What happened? What’s going on?

JESS: Well, we have a 25-year-old kitchen counter of five-inch, square ceramic tiles. Some of the tiles have become pitted and the off-white color has become dingy. We’ve been unable to locate replacement tiles and solid-surface replacements won’t guarantee us that our adjacent garden window won’t be damaged. Do you have any suggestions?

LESLIE: Are the damaged pieces sort of all in one area or are they interspersed throughout the entire countertop?

JESS: They tend to be in the most conspicuous – near the edge – simply because, out of ignorance, early on we were cleaning off this countertop with vinegar and I suppose it has tended to eaten little pits into the tile.

TOM: Well, vinegar is a very, very mild acid but I’ve never heard of it being possible to eat away at the tile. But Leslie, any suggestions for ways that maybe we could replace these worn tiles with ones that are complementary?

LESLIE: (overlapping voices) Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, if they’re sort of spaced out where if you popped, you know, one of the worn ones out and maybe you could put in maybe not even a five-inch tile but five-by-five of little one-inch fun mosaics to make it a little bit more colorful or like a design choice or a decorative tile; something that’s a little different if it’s sort of interspersed and you can make it almost seem like it was a design choice.