Set in Stone

Even with the new unintentionally matched bamboo flooring, our downstairs kitchen was still looking decidedly unfinished.

Next item on the agenda? A new benchtop!

Because we've been aiming for this downstairs area to be a secondary little granny flat to the main house upstairs, I didn't think it was necessary to pay thousands of dollars for a stone benchtop like the one in the upstairs kitchen.

So, we started investigating laminate options. I got about four quotes from various people for a laminate benchtop. They all varied quite a bit, but they all were able to shock us with their expensiveness! In our innocent opinion, stone not only trumps laminate, but is at least three times better-looking. So, by that assumption, laminate should be less than a third of the cost of stone, right?

Wrong.

We paid $3,200 for our SmartStone benchtop upstairs about a year ago, so we figured that a laminate benchtop should cost less than $1,000.

Well it doesn't.

The cheapest quote I got was $1,600, with the most expensive being $2,300! I then tried pricing a custom laminate benchtop with IKEA, and it came in at only $769. But there were two problems with that.
1) IKEA's quoted timeframe was about two weeks for delivery of the benchtop, which was longer than I wanted to wait.
2) There were no guarantees that the benchtop would fit perfectly when it was delivered, because they would be relying on my measurements of the space to make it, and if any of our corners were anything other than a perfect 90 degree angle, the benchtop wouldn't be cut to fit that. So I would probably need to get my carpenter to retro-fit the benchtop in place once it arrived, which would of course cost more money in labour.

So. A laminate benchtop wasn't actually looking like the quick, inexpensive, easy option that we hoped it would be. So, in frustration, I decided to get in touch with the guy that made our upstairs benchtop, to see what something similar in stone would cost for our downstairs benchtop. He came around and measured up the very next day, and his quote came in at $2,640. Certainly not cheap, but considering that it gave us the beautiful stone option as compared with the nearly-as-expensive and nowhere-near-as-nice laminate options, we decided to just bite the bullet and fork out the extra for the stone.

And within the week, they arrived with our big hunks of stone.

And the process of gluing it to the tops of the cabinets began.

Oh and while we're in the area, has anyone noticed the black brick tile splashback that's been going on in the back of the kitchen?

It's the same tile that we used on the shower wall in the downstairs bathroom, and because we had a lot of tiles leftover, I decided to ask the tiler if he might be able to use them in the kitchen. Lovely guy that he was, he agreed, and didn't even charge me any extra! That's my kind of tradesperson!

Anyway, back to my beautiful new benchtop!

The kitchen is really taking shape and looking like a real one now, huh?

And I even got the same waterfall edge that we got for the upstairs kitchen. It added about $300 to the overall cost (already added into that original quote price), but I think it's totally worth it.

Look! A real kitchen!

Now to sort out things like a kitchen sink...

And a stovetop and oven!

Minor details!

But those are coming. In the meantime, there's more to this benchtop story! Just you wait. Those benchtop-cutting guys didn't get to escape my clutches just yet... to be continued...