Our kitchen has been coming along nicely.  My husband ended up being unable to take a day off this past week, which meant that he didn’t have that block of time to get work done that I originally was counting on when I set my ambitious goal of having it all done within 5 days.  And of course when you start a project like this, you end up running into unplanned things that need to be dealt with (like the range hood that we decided to vent outside instead of having all the air recirculate as happens with unvented hoods). 

But by Friday, all the cabinets were in, the double oven and cooktop were installed, and even the sink was in.  The sink was in, but the pipes weren’t attached….but still, all in all, a very impressive show of accomplishment from my husband, who was working with very limited time.

 So late Friday afternoon, I was warming up some food on high and managed to burn the brand new countertop.  Yes, less than two hours after the installation of the cooktop was finished.  I couldn’t believe it.  I wanted to run out Saturday night and just buy entirely new countertops, but my husband wasn’t excited about that.  He reminded me that we said we would keep this as low budget as possible and one burn mark wasn’t a justifiable reason to go buy another 26 feet of countertop.  So I reluctantly agreed, since my argument ‘once we’re doing all that work, it should look really good’ didn’t really hold up to the cost argument.

But today dh was measuring to fit the corner and realized that the amount of countertop we bought won’t be enough due to how they needed to be cut.  That was enough to get me started on ‘let’s go buy all new countertops’, which he still wasn’t thrilled about.  But I wasn’t willing to lose countertop space by changing the original plan.  It just seemed to me penny wise and pound foolish to have spent all that money for everything, and then to limit the effectiveness of the layout because of the additional cost.  I’m fortunate that my husband isn’t the kind of person who makes a decision and then sticks to it no matter what – he’s very open to discussion and ended up agreeing that we should just buy new countertops.  So off I went to Home Depot (which sometimes feels like my home away from home.)

They had four kinds of countertops there, and surprisingly, one of the patterns displayed was identical to what I bought at the building salvage supply place!  I couldn’t believe it.  Even though I would like to buy one of the other patterns more, out of respect to my husband’s concern about the cost, I’ve decided to stick with the current countertop design so that the replacement costs will be limited.  As much as I like asthetics, I value my husband and his feelings more, even if he wouldn’t insist on it.  And it will end up looking very nice, anyway.

So what we will do is this: replace the burnt counter with the second counter we bought, which doesn’t have a backspash – which is what we should have used in the first place and then we wouldn’t have had a problem with burning the backsplash.   And dh told me when he installed the sink (which is on the same length of countertop) that it would have been much easier if we had used the countertop without a backsplash.  You live and you learn….. 

 Then we’ll only need to spend another $150 – $170 on the remaining countertops from HD.  Then everything will match and I won’t have to look at that burn mark anymore.  Yeah, that’s money, but before we were thinking all the money we spent on the first set of countertops was totally wasted plus we would have to spend another $300 or so for new ones.  It actually ends up that it was really good that we bought the first set of countertops, since Home Depot only sells countertops with backsplashes, unless you custom order.  So our mistake will only cost us about $30, it’s not a big loss like it could have been.

Avivah