Final Countertop Choices

We have countertops locked in. You may have already seen one of our choices from the kitchen design post. But actually, we decided to change that countertop, so read on to find out what the switch was 🙂. We’ve gone back and forth with countertops for a while now, but it feels good to have our choices locked in.

We need tops for all the bathrooms, the laundry room, the pantry, and the kitchen. We are also doing bar seating on our outdoor patio at the dining room window. This window is 10’ wide and will open like a slider door from the middle, so there will be a 5’ opening. We are treating this as one of those pass-through windows (those are very expensive, so this was our compromise 😆). So because it’s a pass-through, we wanted the bar seating on the outside. All this to say, we need a countertop here as well.

We went to a local distributor initially and made some choices. Once our quote came back, we felt that it was too high, so we knew we needed to change some of our choices. We decided to go to one of the warehouses of a brand that this distributor can get. This way we could look at granite, quartzite, and quartz options. We made some choices there and sent them to the distributor for another quote. These were our initial choices:

And these were our choices from the warehouse:

This quote came back much more reasonable, but we decided we really only loved the option we chose for the bathrooms. We decided to go back to our original choice for the kitchen and pantry, and look for remnants for the laundry room and bar seating. Remnants are often a good option to help someone on a budget because they are pieces left over from other jobs that the distributors will sell to you at a lower price. So as long as you can find something you like that has enough left, you can sometimes get a deal on a nice countertop.

We ended up finding great remnants for both the laundry room and the bar seating. Then we were second guessing our choice for the kitchen and pantry after switching the kitchen cabinets to white oak. We were afraid the Mirraggio Gold would be too stark white against the cabinets. So we went back to one of the warehouses to look at some more natural stones since we couldn't seem to find a quartz we loved. 

We ended up finding a beautiful stone that we fell in love with, so we decided to lock in our choices. All the tops in the bathrooms and laundry room will be quartz. The kitchen and pantry will have quartzite, which is a natural stone. We were told that quartz isn’t great for outside, so we chose granite for the bar area that will hold up outside.

In the laundry room we will have a quartz called Calacatta Winter Creek. This is a warm white base with some gold and gray veining throughout. Our cabinets in here will be Sherwin Williams Evergreen Fog, so we felt this would compliment them well.

The kitchen and pantry will have a quartzite called Taj Mahal. It has soft beige/creams throughout. We felt this was perfect to compliment our soft, neutral kitchen. 

All the bathrooms will have a quartz called Calacatta Karmello. This one has a warm white base with golden brown veining, lines, and specks. We felt it would look nice and calming in our bathrooms.

Then the granite for the bar area is called Marinus Leather. Colin spotted this one in the remnant yard and we immediately knew it was perfect. It has a black base with white-ish lines throughout. This is very different from the rest, but we thought it would be a fun pop for the patio.

All in all, it’s a weight off to have another choice finalized. We feel great about these countertops and it’s just making us that much more excited to see everything come together!