This week in the ongoing kitchen renovation chronicles: new counters! This spring I wrote a post about what we were thinking for counters, and asked for your feedback. We ultimately decided to go with what I’d had in mind all along, which is white corian counters. Corian is solid surface, which means that stains and scratches can be sanded away if needed. It has a reputation for being very durable and low maintenance, and it’s also quite affordable as far as counters go — we paid $1,033 for 30 square feet, taking advantage of a 10% off sale.

We bought the counter through Home Depot, and then they contracted with a local company to do the fabrication and install. (Update: I should have mentioned that I started by using Home Depot’s countertop estimator tool to get an estimate for the work, and then I went into a Home Depot in person to buy it. They required me to draw a picture of the counter with dimensions in more detail than the online estimator tool ever asked for, so I was glad I came prepared with my own sketch –that’s definitely a tip if you go this route too! Also the estimator said that the cutout for a top mount sink was free while in the store they had a fee associated with that, so I had to argue for them to honor the online information, which eventually they did.)

A month ago I posted about the templating process, which involved taking precise measurements:

The counter was ready for install 12 days later, but they could only install on a weekday so we needed to wait some time before I was able to take a day to work from home.

Before installation, though, we had to prep the room by taking out all the drawers and removing the old counter and sink ourselves (we could have paid for them to do this, but we wanted to save some money). Let me be clear: this was our first foray into plumbing of any kind, and neither of us had any idea what we were doing. First we turned off the water, and then the power to the garbage disposal.

We really didn’t know how to remove the garbage disposal, but we ended up following the process laid out in this video. I disconnected the wires from the disposal switch, and then we worked on the plumbing. It was a little more complicated than we expected because we couldn’t get the coupling off of the pvc drain pipe connected to our garbage disposal, so I ended up having to saw it off with a hand saw…not exactly best practices, but there didn’t seem to be any other way.

Here’s a dramatic reenactment (the expression on Sam’s face when he walked into the room and saw me sawing was horrified enough that I didn’t feel like asking him to take a photo at that moment was a great idea).

And here’s the fruits of my sawing:

Once the garbage disposal was out, we were able to undo the clips holding the sink to the counter. We were sure to salvage the garbage disposal drain from the sink so we can reuse it in our new sink.

With the sink out, we were able to remove the counter. First we pried the backsplash portion off with a hammer and screwdriver.

It was screwed in from below, so we just took out the screws with a screwdriver and then carried the counter out to our bagster.

Even though I scored the caulk along the edge of the counter with a utility knife, I obviously didn’t do a good enough job since some of the sheetrock ripped as we removed the counter:

We’ll be tiling along here, so it’s a pain but not the end of the world.

We made a really strange discovery in the corner space that’s only accessible with the counter off:

Why someone would throw a little plastic stool in there before sealing up the counters is beyond me.

A few days later, the counters were delivered and installed! It only took about 30 minutes and the guys were great.

They screwed the counter in from below, and dry fit our new sink just to be sure it fit in the opening (the task of installing the sink was all ours).

The new sink we got is the same dimensions as the old sink, but single basin — we never used the second basin in our old sink because we dry our dishes in a dish rack next to the sink, and the garbage disposal was connected to only one basin so that’s the one we relied on for washing dishes. It was impossible to soak large pans because they didn’t fit in either basin, and so the idea of a single large basin seemed like heaven. I picked out an affordable one with faucet included from Home Depot:

It’s not exactly the most beautiful, but this renovation has gone over budget in other areas and we need to choose where to invest. We can always upgrade the faucet or sink down the road if I really want to, but really it’s just fine and for $199 it was hard to beat the price.

Installation was harder than I had hoped, but ultimately successful. First I installed the garbage disposal drain in the sink (rather than the drain kit that the sink came with), which I secured down with some plumber’s putty.

Once I put the drain apparatus on from below (just reverse engineering what I had removed from the old sink), the excess putty squeezed out — it was pretty cool.

I just scraped that away with a flathead screwdriver. After that I just followed the instructions that came with the sink, but the clips to hold the sink down to the counter from below proved to be extremely difficult to use. Cramming yourself inside a sink cabinet and then trying to operate tiny little hardware up in the narrow crevices around the sink just isn’t easy. We got 6 of them in, though, and then called it quits.

It was easy to get the water hooked back up. The garbage disposal was a little tricky because of my drain-cutting decision. First I needed to cap off the part of the drain that had connected to the second sink basin, since our new sink only has one drain. I used the saw to remove the bend in the pipe:

And then used a cap that I’d gotten at Home Depot, secured with some pvc cement.

To connect the second line back to the garbage disposal, first I had to remove the portion still attached to the disposal:

I did that with a complex configuration of wrenches and clamps to apply pressure in opposite directions and get just the coupling ring to turn:

Eventually it loosened, and I was able to remove it. Whew! To prepare the drain pipe for the disposal, I had to make a clean cut with the saw right before the elbow piece, then attach a new elbow piece, a short straight length, and then a new coupling to attach to the garbage disposal. I secured it all with pvc cement.

I really have no idea what I’m doing, but nothing seems to be leaking so hopefully that was an acceptable method.

The last step was to rewire the disposal to its switch, turn back on the power and water, and give it a try! Everything seems to be working well for now, at least!

Unfortunately I don’t have that many great photos to show you, as our kitchen is currently a disaster zone — I moved everything out of the dining room to start installing the floor, and now we are living with this:

The floor installation is a harrowing and depressing story for another day, but in the meantime here are some counter/sink photos to tide you over:

As you can see, we still have the blue counter on the island — we’ll be doing butcher block there eventually. But the room already looks to much brighter with the new corian counters, and a week into having them I’m still really liking the material (obviously time will tell).

I think in every project there’s some piece that stands out as the biggest pain point. No matter how much time you pour into it, it just refuses to be resolved. As you’ve figured out by now for our kitchen project, it’s our floor.

I won’t retread everything we’ve covered, but if you’re looking to get up to speed on The Floor you can check out some past posts (where I first discovered what a PITA this would be, where readers gave me awesome advice, where I committed myself to removing the existing floor, and where we removed 350 square feet of tile and barely escaped with our sanity). And as I mentioned last Friday, after I picked out and ordered new tile from Lowes, it arrived and I was hit with the sinking realization that I just wasn’t into it.

Now, Naomi and I looked at this together in the store. We liked it and thought it was subtle and not too “I’m trying to be stone but actually I’m fake because real stone is way too expense.” But when it arrived (all 25 boxes of it, delivered on a pallet) and I brought one box inside, I just didn’t feel the same. I felt like the fake was oozing right out of it.

At this point Sam was ready to just have a floor already, but after all the work of bashing up and removing the old floor and all the work that would go into laying 350 square feet of new tile, I knew I just couldn’t do it if I wasn’t going to be happy with the results. So over the course of a weekend, I made three separate trips to Lowes, each time wandering despondently up and down the flooring aisles hoping some amazing new option would present itself. The problem was, there were just so many constraints that required ruling out the usual suspects. These constraints included:

* Tile is annoyingly difficult to lay and requires equipment like a wet saw. Plus thinset, grout, and tools add to the cost, so it’s important to factor in all that into the total price on top of the actual tile. Additionally, we knew that laying the tile onto the wood subfloor wasn’t a great approach but would be necessary (see my post about removing the tile for why), so I didn’t feel stellar about doing that. I was prepared to confront all this, but taking on all this work for tile I wasn’t excited about was not enticing, and I was really struggling to find something attractive but also affordable.

* Click and lock laminate tile is much easier to lay, but everything I saw had the same fake feel to it. I just wanted something simple and solid that didn’t look like it was trying to be marble or something fancy, but apparently people are really into fake stone these days because that’s all I could find.

* The kitchen adjoins several rooms with hardwood floors, so I knew that affordable and easy-to-lay laminate was out — laminate can look great on its own, but not so great next to real wood floors. That also meant that real wood wasn’t ideal, because the likelihood of matching what we already had was very slim, plus I don’t love the orange-y tone of our existing hardwood floors so I wasn’t jumping with joy at the thought of adding another 350 square feet of it. And the thought of stripping all our existing hardwood floors and refinishing the whole main floor of the house was NOT appealing, especially given that as you recall, a new kitchen floor let alone new house-wide floor wasn’t even part of the original plan or budget. To top it off, most laminates and wood floors require an underlayment, so we would be dealing with the problem of uneven thresholds and cutting down doors and trim to accommodate, not to mention the additional cost of underlayment materials.

* I thought about another kind of wood like cork that doesn’t look like regular hardwood floors so would be less likely to clash, but I really couldn’t find light colors that I was excited about. I hate dark floors because I think they show more dirt (especially when you have two light-colored cats), so that just wasn’t an option.

So it seemed like wood, laminate, and tile were going to be a massive pain, not be ideal aesthetically, and and come with all sorts of additional costs. Not exactly a winning combo for any of them. All I wanted was a magical solution that would solve all my problems — something thin, easy to lay on our uneven floors, durable, not be trying to masquerade as wood or stone, and not clash with our existing floors. Also it would be great for it to be affordable. Is that too much to ask?

One thing I did come across that I found appealing was linoleum, which has a bad reputation in some circles because people think of it as being similar to vinyl, but it’s actually natural, very durable, and comes in all sorts of awesome colors. But everything I read about linoleum stressed the importance of installing it on a totally flat surface, and even though we were able to get most of the thinset up, our floor is still far from perfectly even (as Murphy can attest).

I spent a ton of time googling to uncover that magic silver bullet, and was pretty much giving up hope. Hence the continued trips to Lowes, each one more depressed than the last, hoping I could find a solution but steadily resigned to the fact that I’d probably have to pick something suboptimal on at least one of the above dimensions.

After my third trip to Lowes I decided as a last ditch effort to swing by a local flooring place where I had tried unsuccessfully to find a match for our old kitchen floor back when I was in that stage of the Neverending Floor Project. The salesperson showed me a lot of laminate tile options, and then left me to browse. I was trying to figure out which one looked least like fake stone and wondering if I could stomach it when I saw it: the magical solution I had been dreaming of. Marmoleum click and lock tiles.

Marmoleum is a brand of linoleum. I had seen their name when I was learning more about linoleum, and people love them. Their linoleum comes in so many crazy and fun colors, and people do all sort of cool things with it. But as I mentioned, I quickly discovered that stick-on tiles or sheets of linoleum just wouldn’t be workable on our uneven subfloors and so I moved on. But here were click and lock tiles right in front of me, intended to be applied easily over an uneven subfloor and with a cork backing right on each tile to eliminate the need for an underlayment. The click and lock doesn’t come in as many amazing colors as the regular peel and stick tiles, but there are still 28 options.

I asked the saleswoman for her thoughts, and she said that Marmoleum is incredibly durable and very well-liked. They lent me a few samples, and I took them home to the house (where I conveniently forgot to snap side-by-side photos of them…life has been crazy). I was especially intrigued by Silver Shadow, a light gray with a slight hint of turquoise in some light:

And sky blue:
The sky blue looked pretty light in the store when compared with some of the darker hues, but in our house it just felt too blue. The silver shadow, by contrast, felt perfect. Even though I’m normally drawn to more color and Marmoleum would let us do something really bold and fun (people do all sorts of cool patterns), I have been dreaming of a floor that just feels neutral and unobtrusive, and lets the rest of the kitchen be the star.

The tiles come in a square 12″x12″ or rectangular 12″ x 36″. The rectangular ones seem to be cheaper per square foot and since we’re not doing a pattern I’m fine with that shape.  Still, the price is nothing to sneeze at — even shopping around, $5.91 per square foot is the best I’ve been able to find, which isn’t insane but is a far cry from the $2 per square foot I was originally aiming for when tile was the likely culprit. For 350 square feet of flooring plus the 10% overage usually recommended, that would come to almost $2,300. That’s astronomically more than the $0 we originally budgeted for this, and still a lot more than the $800 I’d been imagining for a tiled floor. Of course it’s important to factor in that there won’t be any other additional costs — no supplies or tools necessary, so the psf cost is the full-loaded price unlike for so many of the options I was considering. A very generous wedding gift from my stepfather is helping support some of the cost, but it is still a stiff pricetag to contemplate — we were originally planning to spend no more than $10,000 on our entire kitchen renovation, and that just won’t be possible now.

But by this point in the process, I was fully convinced that there was nothing else out there that would better meet our needs. And all the enthusiastic reviews of Marmoleum I was reading also convinced me that this is a high quality product worthy of a little splurging. Plus in the grand scheme of a kitchen makeover, this is a definitely not pocket change but it also isn’t out of the realm of the reasonable. And so, we decided to go for it.

Ultimately, the best deal I found was at a place online called Green Building Supply. Shipping is free (which can really ding you on something big like this), and for some reason there was also no sales tax. Late Friday night, we decided to pull the trigger and buy 19 boxes (this will give us 386 square feet, which is the recommended 10% more than our actual square footage).

Now I’m impatiently awaiting delivery, at which point I’ve basically convinced myself I can install it in 30 minutes because it’s so easy, right? Clearly this is delusional and if the rest of the floor saga is any indication we’ll hit some unexpected snag, but right now I’m enjoying the fantasy.

The one other loose end was how to return the 25 boxes of tile to Lowes. Though they offer free returns, they don’t offer to come back to your house and pick it up for you. And since the tile was delivered on a very very heavy pallet, I had no idea how we could return it to a store ourselves other than loading it box by box into our car and then doing it all in reverse at Lowes — which did not seem appealing in the least.

Fortunately for us, they didn’t follow their standard delivery protocol when delivering the tile, in that they didn’t ever send a shipping confirmation or contact us in advance of the delivery, so there was no way we could have been home to see the tile when they delivered it. So when I talked to them on the phone about how I could possibly return the tile, they were very understanding and offered to come back and pick it up. It took a few days of back and forth with various people in the delivery department of the local store, but ultimately the tile disappeared from our driveway.

So in conclusion, we are in a moment of calm and hope with the floors. Naomi and I are actually taking a little spring break from blogging next week (we’re not doing anything exciting, just taking a week off from posts), and when we come back on May 16th I’ll have new counters and maybe a new floor to share with you! Until then, I wish you many magical solutions to whatever home improvement woes are currently getting you down!