DIY: Cactus Mosaic Table

As promised, here’s my blog post about this DIY project of mine. This project was actually the result of my frustration of not finding the perfect print of tiles for my working table. I went to every hardware store here in Butuan, but I couldn’t find the one that I wanted. So the thought of making my own mosaic tile design came to mind. 

This is my first time to ever make a mosaic table and it was not so hard until the part where you actually stick the tiles to the wood, that part was a pain in the neck, literally. Like there were like more than a thousand pieces of broken tiles, and that is where hubbybooboo came to the rescue. This was a two weeks project and it was a great bonding time for me and my man.

These are the things/tools that you will be needing for this project:

• Safety gloves (so you won’t cut yourself upon breaking the tiles)
• Safety glasses
• Hammer (any size will do but this small one in the photo is very convenient coz it’s not that heavy)
• Pencil (to draw your design on the wood)
• Pliers (to make the edges of the tiles rounded)
• Steel tape
• Construction adhesive with a gun dispenser
• Tiles (for this project I use 5 solid colours and 3 printed ones, the number of tiles will depend on your project size and your tiles size as well.)
• Tile grout (not in photo)
• Aluminium pail or any container available in your home -optional (where you put your broken tiles)

TIP: If your family or friends happens to have an on-going construction in their house, you can ask for any broken tiles, also, local hardware stores have broken tiles for sale at bargain prices. This way you won’t have to buy new set of tiles and break them into pieces.

All of these things can be found at your local hardware store.

So let’s start

1.  Break the tiles into pieces using your safety gloves and a hammer. It doesn’t need to be even in sizes, the more they are different the better. Hit the tiles on the back side using the hammer.

2.  Draw your design in mind on the table top with a pencil. Here I drawn the pot and the cacti first since this is the focal point on my design.

3.  Fill your design with the broken tiles. Starting off with the pot using printed tiles and then the cacti, here I use the solid green colour.

4.  Once you are done with your cacti in a pot design, stick the tiles one by one using the construction adhesive. Be sure to put a little gap between each tiles so you can be able to fill in the grout.

5.   When everything is glued, you can now proceed filling your entire background. Here I started filling the top part with blue coloured tiles to make it seem like the sky, then green at the bottom part for the grass illusion and then white for the rest of the background.

Since I’m working on a very long table, I divided the table into three frame with 3 different cacti design on each frame.

6.   After every single tile is glued, have it rest for at least 24 hours. Then you can fill the gaps with the tile grout. I actually had our worker done the grouting for me since that part was a bit messy.

After grouting was done and dried for 48hours. I had our carpenter installed the mosaic table top onto the working table and voila, here is the finished project.

Check out more photos of my little garden nook from my previous post here.

That’s all for now guys, hope I inspired some of you to this DIY project. Do leave a comment below if you have any questions or send me links below if you have a similar project. Thanks for dropping by!

Much love,

Sheila 💗