Counters & Cabinet Hardware

Counter tops ended up being really fun!  Here's how it all went down...

First - Choose slabs to place on order.
It was pretty neat seeing how they moved pieces around for me to see.

Here are the chosen ones.  They are consecutive slices which keeps the coloring and the veining close to identical.  That gives the fabricators more wiggle-room when it comes to laying out the design and deciding where to put the seams.
 

The fabricator came to our house, put down the 3/4" base plywood, and then made up the templates.  He used super thin strips of wood, hot glued together, and then wrote notes all over it (where the seams were, which edges to finish, etc.).  The granite in our last house came pre-fabricated and anything they needed to cut, they just did on-site.  So this whole process was new to me.

Then I met with the fabricator's boss (a.k.a his wife) at the stone yard where her and I worked up the details of the design.  She would tape the templates to the slabs and then mark it all off.  This ended up taking almost 3 hours!  It was crazy how much tinkering we had to do with it in order to fit everything on those two slabs.  Plus there were a couple less pretty sections that we wanted to avoid, or at least have in less obvious places.  When all that was set in stone (har har har get it) the fabricator picked up the pieces, took them to his shop, and his team went to work.

About a week later they came for the install.  Here is an in-progress shot.  Isn't it pretty?  I'm in love.

I thought we could get by for a while without hardware, until I realized that you can hardly open anything due to the full-coverage cabinet faces.  So now we had to choose some hardware, pronto, if we were going to be able to unpack!

Oh, before I show you our hardware choices I should show you the faucet.  Ian really wanted one of these huge pull down ones, which was fine, except a lot of them run $1K-$2K and like 3 feet high.  Get out!  Seriously. No thanks.  So when I stumbled on this one from Overstock.com for $170, I was all over it.  I agonized over this after I experienced dish-washing over Thanksgiving at my in-law's home.  They had a similar faucet but it didn't extend far enough and it hurt my back from having to lean over to reach the water.  Who would have thought?  So I had to find something with a long reach, not 10 feet tall, with a sprayer, and not one million dollars.

I didn't pay super close attention to the finish I guess, cause when it came it was a super shiny chrome.  It looked awesome, but I was expecting something more dull... it doesn't look so shiny in the pic, right?  Buyer oversight, but whatever. It's pretty.

So that brings us to cabinet pull #1 - this one is a simple chrome finish.  When we got the sample , as soon as I touched it you could see finger prints everywhere.  I wasn't crazy about it. 

This is the trendy Euro pull style that is really in right now, in brushed nickel.

And this was another brushed nickel option.  #3 is the winner!

It was a choice between #2 and #3 -- and this one gets it because I think it's a little more simple, classic, and a little narrower when viewing from the front.  It does stick out a little further than #2, so I hope that's not a big deal.  I also read a lot of review about people saying #2 style was annoying because their clothes would get stuck on the ends of the bars.  Convinced me.  What I loved about every style though, is it came in tons of different sizes!

I also had to read a ton of kitchen forums regarding varying hardware finishes.  I feel assured that our shiny chrome faucet will still look badass next to our brushed nickel cabinet pulls.  Don't tell me otherwise  ;)

Another in-progress counter top/back splash, along with blue tape hardware guides. 

House - Cabinet Update

My dad spent the greater part of last week installing the kitchen cabinets and I am in love!

He got everything in but the kitchen sink base.  There are a few things that need to be done around the window, and not having the cabinet there makes it much easier.

I knew that the soft close drawers came standard, but a surprising feature that I did not expect was that the doors also have soft close.  They can be like 8" open and still close softly by themselves.  Rad!

We had to cheap-out on some of the roll-out shelves because the cost was skyrocketing for that stuff and we found we could install them on our own, later, for much less.  One *must have* for me was an appliance lift for my stand mixer, only the cost to have it come installed for us was astronomical   Instead, we got a plain base cabinet, ordered the mechanism direct, and my dad put it in.

Cool, huh?

IRL - Where my baby will live.

As part of a special Home Depot was having when we ordered everything, we got a free tiered cutlery divider drawer.  Only, it didn't come put together for us, so being my handy dandy learning self, I took the standard drawer front and locking mechanisms off, and put them on our new cutlery drawer.

Now I have to move on to my next - major anxiety inducing - project of counter-tops and back splash.

If you recall my inspiration pic, they had some stone counters with horizontal 'lines' running through it.  I couldn't find it anywhere.  Finally the nice people at Houzz.com answered my questions and I learned the stone was natural quartzite (like granite but more firm and less porous).  NOT man made like quartz which we originally were going to get, except you didn't get the cool natural variation in the appearance.  So then I had to find a stone dealer that carried quartzite.

I finally found it at a place in Miramar called Tutto Marmo.  They call themselves a Natural Stone BOUTIQUE.  To me Boutique = majorly expensive.  I went in, saw the beautiful stone, and knew I had gone to a place of no return.  It didn't help that this was pretty much the one and only renovation 'thing' that Ian wanted, and agreed with me on.  Le Sigh.  And of course, we can't do it all with one slab.  I'm going to head over in the next couple days and pick our two slabs.  Hoping to have enough left to do full-back splashes, but we shall see!

So that's where we're at.  I got one more room painted this weekend, leaving only the master until we are ready for carpet.