Mr. Fix It

My father has been patiently reminding me to make good on my promise to post before and after pictures of our kitchen and bathroom countertop remodels. I was procrastinating downloading and sorting through all of the pictures, but finally ran out of excuses this evening.

It seemed like a very long process at the time, but looking back I'd say it was all worth it. Mike handled the demo of our existing kitchen countertops and two bathroom vanities, and let me just tell you there's nothing like a little home demo to bring out the testosterone in a man.

Note to self: Don't mess with a man wearing flannel pj pants and carrying a crowbar

You can practically hear the grunting.
The menagerie of tools

We uncovered a small bit of the original gray and raspberry boomerang laminate counters in the kitchen. Ironically, these 1950s-style patterns are back in style now.

Here are before pictures of our hallway powder room and the kitchen. I forgot to take a before picture of our other guest bath vanity, but they both had the same boring laminate countertop, one in gray the other in white. Both bathrooms and the kitchen were redone in the mid-to-late 70s.

Here's a close-up of the charcoal quartz we used to replace all three countertops. It's hard to show the depth and color variation in a photograph, but there are flakes of white and black mixed in with the gray.

The two bathrooms were relatively easy since we used the quartz as a backsplash as well (which was professionally installed). This meant Michael just had to wrestle with hooking up the new stainless steel sinks and doing a little creative plumbing work since they are undermount sinks where before we had overmount ones.

The guest bath

The hallway powder room

The kitchen was a little more mess since we did the quartz backsplash around the sink, but handled our own tiling behind the stove. After many, many web searches we finally settled on some stainless steel hexagon tile since it was in keeping with our mid-century house, but with a modern twist.

And voila! Now we just have to settle the debate over whether or not to keep the wood scallops over the stove and sink. Michael hates them, but something about them seems really charming to me next to such modern finishes.