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.