I had a grandiose vision of the perfect gourmet kitchen- you know, with the pull out cabinetry all in solid hardwoods, gleaming floors, and a place for any pot, pan, or specialty kitchen gadget I could get my hands on.
Then I woke up.
No, seriously- I have a very nice kitchen. It's large and has plenty of cabinet space and several other very nice features. It's just...well, boring. Something that you must know about me is that I am a bit of a kitchen snob. I was never a snob until I started looking at what else was out there...and then I was bitten. Bitten by the shiny glass tiled backsplashes and quartz countertops. Oooooooh- they're pretty. The crapper of the deal is that I'm not what you call wealthy. Even if I HAD the money for half of the crap that came in nice kitchens, I probably couldn't bring myself to pony up the cash-o-lah for any of it.
That is why my husband and I make a wonderful team. We do things on the cheap. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but most times it does. He's an engineer. I should just end this paragraph now.
SO. This is where the story begins. We were out to put a backsplash in our kitchen. I thought this $300 project would really spruce things up. Well, we can't put a backsplash in until we figured out what we wanted to do with our kitchen layout. When we built our house in 2003, we put in this horribly shaped island that just plain didn't work. In order for us not to backpedal and do additional work, it looked like we needed to re-do the island in order to do the backsplash. But wait. If we re-do the island, we need to re-do the countertops because our current granite wouldn't fit. So this is where we're at. A very expensive backsplash indeed.
We priced granite. We priced quartz. We priced solid surface. Dude. This stuff is WAY way WAAAAAY overpriced. There was no way that we were going to pay 10k for countertops. Nope. My cheap-o meter went off and was smoking out both ends. This is when we started to do a little research on concrete.
The great thing about concrete is that it allows for total creative freedom, something that lured me from the beginning. Also huge was that the materials were dirt cheap. A few bags of concrete, some melamine and we'd be off to the races, right? Well, it's not that easy. What you don't calculate into the $500 worth of concrete, melamine, specialty additives is the downright CRAZY time it takes to do this. I guess that's why I'm blogging about our adventures in concrete-to give ya'll a look into what we faced over our several month project.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE LOVE LOVE our new beautiful countertops, but this process definitely isn't for the faint of heart or anyone who just doesn't have time. I was estimating it to take about 6 weeks for us to complete this project- and that was 5 months ago.
Ok- onto the loooong process. Here's what we started with. No too bad.
