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.