Happy New Year….

Hi!  What a year 2015 was.  Onto 2016 and finishing this project!

Guess what?  We sold our house!  Wahoo!  We are very happy.  What a relief.  We got the offer before New Years Eve and accepted it without countering.  It was a great offer so we took it! We had the home inspection this week and are waiting for feedback on that.  The buyers want to close at the end of March which works fine with us.  Now the pressure is really on to get the House house DONE once and for all.

House Remodel Updates…

Speaking of the house.  Things are moving along.  Electrical is almost finished. Now we are waiting for inspections on plumbing, electrical and roofing before we can move forward with drywall and shingles and installing the new AC system.  These inspections are supposed to happen this week.  Hopefully. They are also supposed to be doing the stucco on the addition this week, but so far we have not seen that happen.

We went over to the house yesterday to check things out.  It seems like we are still so far away from moving in there.  Check out these photos.

Still a long way to go but getting there little by little.

Checking out countertops…

We finally went to look at countertops yesterday.  It was very overwhelming.  There were rows upon rows upon rows of all kinds of counters…..granite, quartz, quartzite, recycled glass, etc.  Thousands of different styles.  Those of you who have ever had to go though this know how overwhelming it can be.  Am I right??? I don’t want to pick something I later dislike or get sick of. This is a very big investment and something I will use and see every single day.  I don’t want to make a mistake.

I think we will be going with quartz since it is the most durable, doesn’t stain and is really low maintenance.  My husband and I each picked out three styles (from the wall of samples) then we eliminated two we both agreed were not great to make it four.  We were then able to go into the warehouse where this huge machine pulled out a slab of each so we could get a better look. Here is what we picked.  Top row – Milky Way (left) and Dolce Vita (right), bottom row –  Rock Salt (left) and Stonewashed (right).

And here is a closer look at three of them.  We weren’t able to get a good look, or a better photo of the one on the top right (Dolce Vita).  It was located outside of the warehouse and the machine was not available to pull it out for us, and at this point, the husband was ‘done’ looking, if you know what I mean. We’d been there a while!

We were able to bring home samples of each, except Dolce Vita.  Once we got home we realized both the Rock Salt and Stonewashed looked almost exactly like the Corian countertops we have in our current house! Although we like them, it is time for a change.  So that leaves us with the top 2.  Milky Way looks more granite-like to me and the other one looks almost marble-like.  I like them both, and of course both are on the pricier end of the spectrum. We will have to consider this when making our final selection since our kitchen island is HUGE, and will require a huge piece of material.  Our contractor told us to select several styles and send them to his fabricator, then we can take a look at what is in the fabricators yard and get good prices on his stock material.  Hopefully we will find something similar to the ones we chose.

Which is your favorite?  Or, do you have another style you love that you can recommend? I am not really ‘sold’ on any of these….yet.

We also checked out these cool recycled glass counters.  Aren’t they pretty?  I think they’d be great for the kids bathroom. We’ll see.  You are able to buy half slabs of this product which might be a a good solution for the kids bath and maybe the guest bath too?  We’ll have to figure that out with our contractor.

Any advice for me on materials?  I have had granite before and currently have Corian (which I actually like a lot, surprisingly).  Leave me a comment.

Tomorrow we have an appointment to order doors!  Fun stuff.  Will update you on that next week.

Thanks for reading!