If you want to change up the area behind you cooktop perhaps you could do a herring bone pattern with your subways tile and outline it with the pencil edge. GWer mamadadapaige did that in her kitcehn and it looks very nice. Not sure if I am allowed to post someone elses picture but here is her backsplash

We had that silver backsplash from HD at our last house behind a 5 burner electric cooktop and never had a problem w/ it. Our largest burner was middle back and I used it frequently. Hope this helps!

Safe? Yes, as long as you are not using a regular plain slide-in kind of range. Note the 4" riser/vent at the back of Pirula's range. Any range that has at least a 4" high backsplash on it can go directly against the wall and will be fine from a code and safety standpoint. With your cooktop, it will be a little different. Some makers (such as Blue Star) require 6" of horizontal clearance for their units, but Miele is designed to require less. So, as long as you maintain the requisite 2.75" clearance for the Miele, there will not be a safety issue. Beyond that, I'm very much with akchicago on cleaning the thing. I speak from experience. A couple of decades ago, I had an old-house kitchen with beadboard backsplash. I'm a messy cook. I found it hard to maintain the beadboard without frequent touch-up on the paint. I never found a paint that was tough enough to hold up for any length of time. If you really like the look of the beadboard, I suppose you could consider overlaying it with a clear tempered glass panel. That would allow the beadboard pattern to show through and would be much easier to clean. (I've done something like this behind my stove in my current house, although my wall is just plain painted drywall, The tempered glass panel was inexpensive. The most expensive part was having holes drilled in the glass for the mounting screws.). This post was edited by JWVideo on Thu, Jan 22, 15 at 18:02

That's a very good idea, Suellen, to do tile beadboard. I'm not having any success in searching for where to buy it. : / I look forward to seeing Sheesharee's reveal, tuesday. Some of these reveals just can't come fast enough, LOL. There's another one I'm waiting on that's going to have cabinets painted in SW Softened Green, and I want to see it done... yesterday! I'll also contact sheesharee and see what she discovered, thanks. Well, when all else fails, check the manual, yes? The owner's manual for our cooktop states that it needs 2 3/4" from the edge of the cooktop to combustibles behind it. If that's the case, then it should be no problem to put beadboard behind our cooktop, right? So, maybe this is a non-issue?