I had a nasty flashback from the first pic on the Kitchen Clarity post. Looked my old tile!

I agree with their premise to just tile to the corner, let it die there, and paint the other wall. I think that would look best in your kitchen. If you look closely, the last pic you posted is a different layout than yours. The kitchen there doesn't end in the corner; it wraps around the corner post to another counter run. Still, I would like it better if they hadn't done the sidesplash.

I agree with breezy. Paint the side wall.

I like the idea of painting the sidewall. It will be a cleaner look.

Yep. Just the back wall.
That Formica looks great.
You may want to consider running it up the back wall and using it as your backsplash.

Or you could give in and do what I did: tile the entire schmear down the floor around the corner, so that you have in effect a tiled wainscot. Works best in older homes, but might be effective for your layout?

I think it would look unfinished without the sides done.

If you choose to do the sides, someone here followed the line down from the cabinets, but instead of covering the whole wall, they dropped in down to two tiles high the rest of the way out to the end of the wall. I think they used beveled pieces for those tiles.

We are messy cooks so I would tile the side. I've seen it in a staggered pattern.

It doesn't look to me like the mess you may make from cooking would get all the way across the counters from the range to those side walls. And, many here have done a plain, simple painted backsplash. No tile anywhere. They report no issues with wishing they had tiled instead so I'm not sure a sponge touching the painted walls is that big a deal.

I stand by my earlier opnion. Go without it on the sides.

I think painting the side wall looks cleaner. In our last kitchen, we had no problems with a painted side wall that was 32" from the edge of the gas range.

Paint is cheap and sometimes less is more.

Paint the walls and tile only the back wall.

Thanks for the opinions!

Paint is cheap, but then we have to pick a color, prep the walls, paint the whole kitchen, etc! I just wanted to glue tile on and be done with it.

Saw this picture over in the Darth Vader kitchen thread, with similar cabinet and counter colors -
{{!gwi}}

I think as long as we select a nice tile it would look okay...

I like a sidesplash there. I even (Gasp! Horrors!) like the angled edge you had before (which isn't easy in tile!).

You do have to pick paint anyway. And you also have to pick tile. So no savings there.

I'd rather tile just so I didn't have to repair that surface for paint!

Can't go wrong either way though.

We did painted sides. It never occurred to me to do otherwise, actually. Now that I think about it, I think it would have looked funny to have the tile just kind of ending in mid-air so am glad we went the way we did.

The picture you show above does delineate the tile ending with the door jamb. That makes a difference I think, in giving it a finished look. In one of your pics above it looks like you have door trim on one side ... do you have trim on the other side as well? If so I think tile sides would like nice (but painted sides would still be my personal choice).

Here is ours so you can see what it looks like without:

We did just the back wall. We don't have upper cabinets, though, so it would have been a LOT of sidesplash to install. I considered it, but in the end I made the decision base on (1) cost; (2) no neat way to end it on our particular installation and (3) I just liked the look better. Our cooking wall is much like taggie's, just above. There is only a sheetrock corner there, so there would have to be some way to gracefully stop the tile. And there was no way to do that with our tile.

Yeah - both sides it is just a corner on the sheetrock. So I guess we are painting!

Any tips on prepping the torn up sheetrock for the paint, and for the tile?

We still are trying to find the perfect tile for the backsplash. I wanted a thin horizontal stone kind of thing, but it's hard to picture a grouted sample in the kitchen. Found this 1/4" mosaic that is pretty cool, but $15 a square foot.

The other main contender (at $6/sq ft) is this 1x2" brick pattern, but I don't know if it is too plain.

I remember asking the tile contractor whether or not to do a sidesplash because I was on the fence about it and he said to do it. Not sure whether it was a good or bad thing. Personally I don't think it makes much difference one way or the other : / Sorry not much help, but we do have the sidesplash. I might be tempted to leave it off if the tile were really expensive and it was difficult to install.

Follow up, finally! Thanks for all the opinions. I bit the bullet and went with paint. Just had to sand the wall, apply Gardz sealer, smooth with joint compound, spray on some light texture, and paint the whole kitchen! :P

For the tile I found some Marazzi porcelain that I liked, kind of a large scale horizontal mosaic.

Also put in some under cabinet lighting.

Is this thread showing up in the list of topics? I don't see it...