Yes, we took down one kitchen cabinet this weekend and then we stopped – we rock! Actually we just wanted to test how easy it was and it was crazy easy (especially given the impact driver, my new favorite tool!) so we decided to spend time taming our wild spring yard and finalizing the materials for the guest house. We also cleaned the whole guest house out over the last couple of weekends which was a feat unto itself. Now all of Eric's stuff is piled high in the library – good thing we had a spare room to put it all in. For the time being I'll be calling it that cat jungle gym until we can reclaim it. And speaking of cats we also took some time this weekend to look at kittens – nothing for us yet, but some possibility on the horizons. What is more important – renovations or kittens? Yeah I thought so…
So yes, we've been busy but no destruction yet – soon my friends, very soon.
In terms of materials we made some serious headway – I ordered our special order glass and stone tile for the shower "waterwall" as I was told it would take some time to come in. But less than a week later we got a call that it was ready to pick up. We got just 8 of these tiles for a vertical floor to ceiling strip in the shower (they are 16x16) and they look even better in person than they did on the sample. Oh, fancy!
We also got our special order floor tile in which is awesome – this is just for the shower pan and we'll do a border around the floor with the brown hexes too. We'll seal them so they'll darken and shiny up a bit too. Some of those veins have a blue-ish tinge so they really match that glass tile perfectly if I do say so myself.
Man I love tile! In another tile related coupe I was strolling through Lowe's and saw our wall tile mini-bricks for almost half the price than they cost at Home Depot – score!
Also Lowe's sell pretty much identical 12x12's to Home Depot also cheap = $1.58 per tile vs. $1.75 per tile at Home Depot – now given the amount of tile this only saves us about $25 which is nice but it's not why I'm so happy to have found this. Remember that the Home Depot tile has beveled edges which we did not want – why? When cutting then in half to make them into big bricks (6x12) the cut edges would be straight and we would have to shave a bit off the non-cut edges to make them straight. Very labor intensive but worth it to save some cash. Well the Lowe's tile has a straight edge so all that work now goes out the window. Yay - saving time and money like it's going out of style!
Also in the department of saving money, but albeit in other room – we found out the kitchen countertop we wanted in Quartz (Dupont Zodaiq) was mad expensive so we were pondering granite which brings the price down a bit, but just a bit. Basically the Dupont Quartz was $80 per square foot and the Granite we liked is $64 per square foot – well I found another brand of Quartz through Lowe's that is $51 per square foot – it's not as high quality as the Dupont but it's much nicer than any laminate and easier to maintain that granite (not to mention cheaper) so we are going with that. It knocks a big chunk off the cost and the only way to go cheaper is with laminate and we are far too snooty for that!
We will do "Kamari" from this photo as even though it's a bit darker than "Chelan" it has the right tones to match our backsplash tile:
What backsplash tile you might ask? We are leaning towards this mini-brick. The cabinet and appliance are so dark we are really trying to keep the backsplash and countertop light…
Okay I promise pictures of destruction soon – nothing stopping us now!
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