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Friday, February 19, 2016

Deciding on 'Fantasy Brown' Quartzite Granite


Our kitchen reno is officially over.. what a fun and stressful time!! Before I show you the full reveal let me show you some of the progress.. Here is one of the main staples in the design of our kitchen.. The counter top!!
Now that we decided on cabinets came the fun part .. choosing a counter top.. I thought this was going to be a no brainer.. I went into it thinking No more laminates.. maybe butcher block, granite or quartz, would love a marble.. but I'm not that careful in the kitchen plus I have kids.. Then we went and looked at options.. First let me tell you.. warn you if I may.. Never go down the marble aisle!! NEVER!! It will end up in heart ache,, seriously I knew I loved marble before but when you see all the big slabs staring at you its insane how gorgeous it really is! Even my hubby loved it.. But from a practical stand point I just couldn't..I know that when I inevitably stained or scratched it, I would be so mad at myself.. So onto the Granite aisles.. so many to choose from, all I knew is I wanted a light-ish granite like a Carara Marble. Ah hah ha ha sounds so simple right? wrong.. Oh my gosh first off granite isn't just granite..who knew?? Not me! It's granite quartzite, quartzite granite.. all very confusing. The short of it is.. The granite quartzite is more like a marble, softer, more likely to scratch or stain :(.. But not nearly as delicate as a marble.. the colours however broaden our search a ton, with a ton of marble-like options with lighter creamier whiter, grayish bases.. so I had my list of granites to choose from thanks to Pinterest. .. And you know what.. it all went out the window when we walked by this slab 'Fantasy Brown Quartzite'.. now wait the name makes no sense :) It doesn't have any true brown in it.. Bits of ivory, taupe's and greys! It's slightly busy in its movement BUT the colour tones are soothing, right up my alley. and the best part is the hubby and I agreed!! Now this fact is not lost on me.. quite the opposite actually I lost sleep over it.. Me and the hubby agree??.. "No way, there must be a mistake!we need to choose another slab!".. And so we went back again just to be sure.. and sure enough I was in love! The only thing I will say, is you really have to love the stone you pick.. Embrace its natural beauty.. Because in certain lights, for us its natural light.. which we have a ton of.. On a certain angle you can really see the dots inside the stone which makes it look kind of like water marks :( We are calling them 'fleckles' in the stone.  Now I am just EMBRACING its natural beauty and not letting it bother me cause I know its all part of it, the stone itself has a ton of character almost like a geode glittery stone.. So if you are looking for a marble alternative this might appeal to you. Obviously our counter is still new but so far we LOVE it! So here it is..
I took the above picture at my local Home Depot that shows all the granite options they carry.. The 'Fantasy Brown' granite is the most whitish granite pictured in the middle right.  Below is a picture of our BEFORE counter. It was a faux granite Laminate counter top.
And here it is now :)

We went with a 2 1/2" thickness for the edge.. The slab starts off as 2cm quartzite/granite and then you choose the edge.. I HIGHLY recommend the "Mitered edge"... It creates a seamless flow of the granite down the sides/edge. The company we went with did an incredible job mitring it. It's honestly so hard to even see the seam.


We ended up painting the island..You can see our full kitchen reveal HERE!!



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Saturday, February 13, 2016

Lighting for 9ft Kitchen Island

We went back and forth on this one.. should we keep our current hurricane lantern lighting? add pot lights? go with one huge chandelier, go with 2 small chandeliers, or one big pendant??? In the end we went in a completely different direction than we currently had..click for full details ..