Bricks!

We needed to redo the brick step in the back of the house because of the new mudroom door. I trolled craigslist and found some old bricks to use that matched our existing old brick patio a little better than brand new bricks. This was one of the only things that actually went pretty smoothly and was completed in like 2 days. I really like how they were able to keep the left half of the step and retain that bit of curve to match the rest of the patio.

Old Patio

New Patio

We are so close to being done (although we’ve been saying this for about a month now…) and in the last week or two before we are set to schedule final inspection… we get hit with the “shelter in place” order. We had been following the news obsessively and knew this was coming. We also had been taking as many precautions as possible the weeks leading up to the order as far as wiping down the house every time a contractor came through and trying to stay out of the house while they were working.

As far as we can tell, the order still allows for residential construction, we contractor has electrician, plumber and finish guy still working. Inspectors are all a little unsure about how much they will be working though so we are hoping we don’t get held up from officially moving in because of a shut-down when everything else is working and ready to go!

Almost the entire house was getting a little refresh with the project. Except the kitchen. So at the last minute the contractor said he would help us install new cabinets/countertops in the same configuration as existing.

We got the cabinets super cheap (<$10K for main kitchen, kitchenette, laundry and bathroom cabinets) from NGY Stone and Cabinets. They look nice enough, basic shaker style, soft close as all that. I am not sure the quality will be as good as IKEA, but they were cheaper than IKEA, delivered within a week after ordering–and were already assembled.

Countertops were a little trickier.

For one thing, we have a garden window that sticks out about 13 inches beyond the wall in front of our sink. This means we need a wider piece of material (regular countertops about about 25.5 inches deep (with the 1.5 inch overhang).

We had already decided we needed Paperstone countertops in the JADU/guest room kitchenette because we needed the green building recycled content credit. I got a quote from Scan-Top to do the whole kitchen in Paperstone as well, it was over $10K (about $2.5K for just the guest room)! I was not expecting countertops to be that expensive, especially relative to the cabinets. I was also a little nervous about Paperstone in our main kitchen, it takes a little bit of gentle care and I am not sure I see my kids wiping up every water spill. So I started looking into other materials just to see what my options were.

I had never purchased or really looked into any kind of counter materials other than the recycled options. After doing a lot of googling I learned more about the traditional options (natural stone vrs quartz). As a bit of a germ-a-phobe, the stuff I was reading about the porosity of marble and granite kinda creeped me out and I decided that I definitely wanted a non-porous material.

Scan-top mainly only deals in quartz, which is a great material (non-porous!), but I didn’t like how the colors were all so sparkly. I really had my heart set on a matte black countertop and they didn’t have any options.

I checked back in with NGY, their countertops were cheap and “pre-fabricated” (they already had a bull-nose and were ready to install). The closest they had to what I liked was a dark grey, but I just thought it looked a little cheap. Their countertops were meant for standard install and it was more of hassle to find larger pieces to fit the garden window situations.

I stopped by good old Home Depot just to see what they had… low and behold one option was Soapstone! Soapstone is a natural stone, but it is naturally non-porous! It was historically used for kitchen countertops and lab benches in research and hospitals because of this property! So that is a triple-win for me: it is a traditional material (for my traditionally inspired design), it is a black matte material, AND it is more sanitary than other natural stones! I became weirdly super excited about this material.

One hiccup with the Soapstone. They only had 3cm tall material available. With 3 cm material, you usually just put the slab on top of the cabinets without a plywood sublayer and no bullnose fabrication. BUT, our previous (1 inch?) counter had plywood underlay and for some reason the new cabinets were not matching up with the height of this aforementioned garden window. It was a little bit of a headache trying to figure out what to do. Options are:

1. just put the soapstone on the cabinets where they are now and have a little “step-up” to the garden window, sort of like this
2. add thick plywood to even it all out and add a bull nose the counter edge to cover the plywood (this would be a really, really thick looking counter!)
3. add thick plywood to even it all out and add some sort of wood trim to cover the plywood without a bull nose (might look a little funny, but hopefully the overhand sort of distracts from the trim anyway…)

We opted for option 3. This does make our countertops on the tall end of normal, but I guess it works!

The pros of working with HomeDepot: cheap. They charge by the square foot instead of making you purchase a whole slab like basically any other dealer would make you do. This was great for us because our project put us just over one slab. Bonus for me–there was some sort of sale when I placed my order and I got additional discounts!

The cons… delays, delays, delays! We placed the order with home depot. Then they had to schedule someone from the fabrication subcontractor to come out a prepare a template (that took a week). Then we had to drive out to the stone slab warehouse and pick out the actual stone slab (you have to sign off on the exact slab for natural stone products since they vary). Then they were supposed to send us a seam diagram within 48 hours, but it took a WEEK. After approving the seam diagram we had to wait for the warehouse to ship the material to the fabricator (another week, minimum). Once the fabricator received the material we finally got to schedule the actual install. So it was over a month from paying with my credit card at home depot, to getting the countertop in my kitchen. Definitely a few thousand dollars cheaper though, so… I guess it was still worth it? Honestly I didn’t get any other exact comparison estimates though so hard to say. If I had more time I would have tried to compare apples to apples.