Counter tops. What to I have to say about counter tops? You don't usually think too much about them. Well Kitchens need them. Ours NEEDED replacing. I think there are LOTS of ugly options. Pretty options are mucho mooolah. ($$$$$$)
That's the short version.
[If you don't like reading, scroll to the bottom to see the final picture]
(I made these large so you can see better. The lighting is not good, sorry)
Please excuse the mess, it's a construction site after all. :)
The deal is: Our house is 50 years old. The kitchen is 50 years old. The original oven and range were barely working. They were that awesome (ly-hideous) extra special shade of burnt orange/brown. Oh yay. So obviously, those had to go. I wanted to keep them and paint them for nostalgia. Daniel wanted to use them as planters. So we tried to sell them on Craigslist. No takers. None. Zip. Nota. A whole lot of Nothing. So.....we "sold" them to a recycling place for about $20. Ok, well now they are out of our carport. Hip, hip, HOOORAY. The hubs is much less annoyed now. I feel like I have betrayed them, but it wasn't working out. You have to know when the relationship is over. Ya know?
Yeah, so back to counter tops. Ours were a lovely beige laminate, not the cool kind with metal trim. Just plain pinky-beige. They had to go. Oh, I said that already? Sorry.
So we did "research." I used pinterest. I found this stuff.
It had some pretty terrible reviews. I believe bad reviews are a direct consequence of people using the product incorrectly (usually) but I wasn't going to do a bunch of irreversible stuff to our counter tops to have it not work. NO, not going to happen. The hubs is NOT on board. He hated the idea.
So, I got another idea (from pinterest, of course)
I said to my self, "Self, this is a great idea! It will look so industrial cool and vintage-y at the same time." This was my plan. Now to convince the hubby. Well I did, kind of, but everyone else we mentioned it to said "poo poo." I read lots of reviews on this too. Some said it worked amazingly. Some said it cracked after a little while. I finally found a lady (the Pioneer Woman, I believe) who put several different counter tops in her home. Concrete being one of them. She said that it was nice, but that she couldn't cook easily on it. Now, I am no Pioneer Woman, but I did want a low maintenance counter top I could easily cook on and it was clearly not going to be concrete. :-(
So the hunt continues.
Copper?
Looks nice. Really expensive and stains easily. (The hubby hates stains)
Stainless Steel would also have shown lots of scratches and fingerprints etc. I did not want to have to buff my counter tops every day. No.
I loved the look of the recycled glass (but, $$$$) Not for us.
So we turned to the ever popular granite (after quickly ruling out marble $$$$)
We looked online, at Home Depot, at a place near in Kennesaw, at a place way up in Alpharetta:
Expensive, and not exaclty what we wanted. (sorry for the horrible pic! eek!)
There is purple in this one. A no-go with the Hubs.
This one was nice, but I wasn't sold. (Confession: I dislike decorating with black.)
This one had a lot of olive green tones. As I was looking to paint the walls baby blue, this was not going to work.
There were a lot of ok options, but nothing I loved. Nothing I thought would fit in with the "image" I felt our kitchen would have. (Wow, how pretentious does that sound) I felt that the kitchen would not look "put-together" with these options. Re-sale value is top in our minds (because even though at this point Daniel says we are never moving again, if we have three kids this house is going to get small fast, however, that time is still a ways off so no worries) so we wanted to pick something that looked nice and would keep looking nice for years to come.
Ugh. Rock and a hard place. Budget and Value. The great balancing act.
So we went to Home Depot, (people there knew our names there for a while.) We were just looking at options when a very nice Orange Apron swept us off our feet. He sat us down and sold us on (my favorite, but very expensive) Silestone. Woah. Bet you didn't see that coming. It was on sale. (my favorite word!) 15% plus if we opened a home depot credit card we could get it for an additional 10% off and have 24 months with no interest. Usually I just say NO to all that credit card mumbo jumbo but when he worked out how much the monthly would be and the total. I was drooling. We went home and thought about it. Asked for some wise counsel from parents and friends.
Then we did it. We bought our counter tops. This was a big (huge!) purchase for us, but one we were excited and ready to make.
Here is my proud husband in our kitchen with our brand-new counters!! Yay! We chose Silestone in Merengo, it's a dark gray that I thought would look nice with the other colors I had in mind. The close up is not a super close up, but I'll post one of those when I post the "done" kitchen pictures.
So that's it for now.
Love,
Sarah
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