Countertops

The countertops are in! We actualy have three different materials, but this was not a complete loss of strategic function.

Laminate is the least expensive option, so it was an obvious choice for our basement project. Besides, it's easy to care for. But so many laminate designs look cheap and we are not doing a retro thing so don't really want space-age amoeba designs or flecks of gold. We also don't think much of laminate trying to look like stone because it really never does. And the flat colours look, well, flat. We thought we might tire of something that was bright or trendy, or that it would look dated soon.

One design caught our eye, though. In general we are trying to keep to natural materials (wood, glass, metal) throughout the space, so finding a laminate that looked like grass was interesting. It has just enough pattern to avoid looking flat, and a colour ways that works quite well with fir cabinets and sage green walls. As the laundry and bar kitchen areas can be seen from each other, this choice ties them together without being 'in your face' about it as the pattern can only really be seen when up close, and from a distance it looks quite different. It's a bit of a gamble, having chosen it from one small sample piece, but now that it's in place, we are happy to not be dismayed by it and are looking forward to seeing it with everything else in place.

We weren't as keen to use laminate for the bathroom vanities. On our research roadtrips we were quite excited to find a stoneworks company that charged only the labour for working small pieces that are offcuts from other jobs, with the material itself in essence being 'free'. Our two vanities required a realtively small amount of countertop, which makes real stone not much more than laminate in cost and ever so much nicer.

The basement bathroom countertop is granite, and quite an eyecatcher. There are sparkly bits that we hope will work well on our prospective silver wall idea. And there was enough material to do a back and side splash for only an extra $50.

Our main floor bathroom, the "Hollywood Bathroom" deserves something suitably glamorous so marble was the obvious choice. We like the idea of black and white to complement the flooring and provide more drama than those marbles that include browns and others colours. The piece we found to work with our oddly shapped, skinny vanity was cut with care to highlight the pattern, with the sink to go into the part that was mostly white.