My Kitchen or Jurassic Park?

So far I have told you about the flooring project, the walls, the paint, the cabinets, the appliances, now we are getting into the fun details!

We began our countertop quest by being set on making our own concrete countertops. We bought melamine boards to cut and piece together a frame to pour our concrete.

We also bought concrete, a mixer and a bucket to test this whole thing out. A DIY post online made it seem like it was easy and simple. Well as I have found out numerous times now, no project is simple and takes way more money and time than planned.

We made a “sample” concrete countertop. It was a small 15 x 20 inches piece of countertop.

After mixing the concrete and pouring it into the frame, we needed to use a vibrating sander to break up all the bubbles that would have been on the top surface.

After a week of drying, the concrete piece was finally ready to check out. The surface was very smooth and it was very cool looking, however… this little piece weighed a TON! We thought about it and decided to save our supplies and sample piece for when we make our bar in the basement using the old cabinets from the kitchen that we saved when we gutted the kitchen.

Now what? We went looking at granite. We ended up at Soulliere Decorative Stone in Utica, MI. I found a couple cool granite slabs I liked, but I feel in love with one that looked like dinosaur eggs. I couldn’t stop thinking about how different and awesome it would look with our black cabinets.

After a few days we decided to go back and ended up picking out the exact slab we liked and ordering it. When you get granite, you usually pick out a slab of it, buy the whole slab and included is the cuts you need and a sink, then the company keeps the scrap pieces.

I thought, as great as our sample concrete countertop turned out, I better leave this to the experts since it is such a huge part of any kitchen.

They cut and installed the granite within a week, it was so easy and they did a wonderful job, and since we had our own sink, they took off money since we weren’t getting the sink that was included with the granite slab. They also made small window sils with the same granite so they would match!

I was very impressed with the company and haven’t had any issues with my granite countertops, except for the fact that if I move I want to take the dinosaur egg counters with me!