Countertop Color Choice is Not As Expected - Already Installed
Heather S.D.
3 years ago
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Heather S.D.
3 years agoRelated Discussions
Help please with counter top choices
Comments (11)@enright5 - I know this is a few months after your initial posts, but I came across your posts while I was looking for photos of real life installations of Lyra and Lagoon Silestone. I can total relate to the original post. I love marble too and the look it provides, but it is not a good fit for my family. Knowing this I am not looking to trick people into thinking I have marble - just LOVE the general look and feel. SO what did you finally decide on?...See MoreProgress - next step counter top install
Comments (6)Looking at the photos again reminds me that we need to figure out how to finish the microwave cabinet. Lol..right now it has a drawer front attached to a forvarva drawer, but it's sitting on the drawer to low. There is also another drawer that was bought to go in the pantry sitting on the shelf above the lower drawer. I have a 5" drawer front, but we think we may just put a 15" there instead. We will definately replace the bottom drawer with a maximera. I didn't put it there because the drawer is my dish towels and dish clothes. But maximera's are easier to install and are worth the extra $ over all....See MoreBacksplash help please! Countertop is cooler color than I expected
Comments (20)Pam, thanks for the hardware site recommendations. I took a quick look and will go back and look more closely later. Since we moved to this house I've spent MANY hours trying to track down hardware that could work. I'm always happy to look somewhere new. Hi mama goose! Yeah, we've moved on. About 4 years ago DH was offered an early retirement so we jumped on it and moved to the west coast. I always loved your kitchen. The current house and kitchen are completely different than before. I looked at some marble and glass mosaics in the tile store the other day. There were a couple of glass mini mosaics that I loved thinking they were marble. I think the first one might be too light. The second one has warm tones too, so could possibly be lovely. megs and mama goose, I have thought about carrara tiles, but I'm worried that the tones won't match what I have. I think that would drive me nuts. My slab had large amounts of darker tones (it reminds me of Portland clouds) and that's what I loved about it. eld6161, the tile you ended up with is beautiful. I wandered into clayhaus tile a couple of weeks ago and they had some matte tiles that were a beautiful match for my marble, but I fear the lighter gray would completely wash out. I was more than a little tempted by the darker gray, but I mocked it up with paint and poster board and was overwhelmed by the darkness in daylight. It actually looked wonderful at night with under cabinet lighting. The two lower ones are the ones I'm talking about: I've been looking for mid-tone grays somewhere between the two. I'll also start looking a little at silver tones as eld6161 suggested. I don't regret the counter choice. During the two years that I lived with the black counters, I disliked them every single day (even after the skylights were installed). In the month that I've had the new counters, I make special trips to the kitchen to admire their beauty. I just need to find that one true backsplash tile!! I'll add another marble photo just for kicks: Thanks to all who have commented!!...See MoreI'm so frustrated! Quartz counter-top installation problems again
Comments (51)Here are a some pics and my dilemma. Keep in mind this is my old fridge...new one comes today! Here is how we ended up with this: I have never had an enclosed fridge so didn't think about the peninsula dying into panels or how deep panels were going to be. I "semi" designed the new footprint and took it to Lowe's where the KD took over. (yes---I know......) Bought Schuler plywood with maple fronts cabinets. Although the kitchen designer had the model number of the fridge we were buying, which is a full-size, she designed the kitchen with 24" deep panels. She knew I was trying to have the look of an enclosed fridge. Being that I've never had an enclosed fridge, it was something I just didn't think of until the install started. Evidently she put a counter-depth in the design program because the elevation sketches she gave me showed an enclosed fridge. "Luckily" the panels actually came in wrong and were cut at only 23" for some strange reason and the installer caught it right away when looking over everything. Otherwise he probably would have installed them and I would be stuck. So called Lowe's to reorder the panels and somehow in all this it suddenly dawned on me that a full size fridge was going to be deeper and require deeper panels. I thought "no problem! Yay I can order them at 30!" By this time the KD had quit her job due to the pandemic. The other KD didn't know what was going on so we called in the Schuler rep. She was the one who immediately told me that those 30" panels would be sticking out in front of the peninsula. She asked if we could move the peninsula forward since the other side is an overhang for seating, but we couldn't since it would bottleneck the entrance into the kitchen down to under 36" and getting rid of an existing bottleneck was one of the reasons for the re-design to start with. So we had a dilemma. We cannot go down to a counter depth fridge which was the other option. What I decided was to split the difference and order 27" refrigerator panels. The fridge without doors is 29.5" so I will have about 3" of the side of the fridge sticking out which I don't like, but while I want my kitchen to look beautiful, I value the functionality too. The old fridge that you see in the pic sticks out a total of 32" The new fridge will stick out 34 with doors but without handles (4.5" of that is doors that would stick out anyway) Here's the really complicated part....we will be installing decorative panels on the end of the fridge as we have them on all the cabinets. This is how you enter the kitchen and I don't want that big blank space there next to the peninsula. The panels should be installed with just 1/4" reveal. I posted a photo below of how the panels look that are already installed on the side of the pantry that adjoins to a 17" high window seat. Luckily those face the opposite way from the fridge panels so you will never see both at the same time. I also posted photos of us holding up panels on the side of the fridge (they are NOT the right size panels...we have to order those still---we just used these to look at the right edge as to how wide to make the panels.) Also keep in mind we can remove the quartz backsplash piece if that would look better. That was not originally planned...the panels were going to sit directly on top of the countertop. So do we order the panels with just the 1/4" reveal to match the panels in the rest of the kitchen? Or, as the Schuler rep recommended, order the panels so they are the same width with the countertop, leaving about 1 3/4" reveal on the right side, but then your eye follows the countertop all the way up. I asked the countertop templater guy if I should just lengthen the overhang on the kitchen side of the peninsula to 2.5" to bring it out to within 1/4" of the fridge panel but he said no....I'm now thinking I should have insisted on it. Especially since we have full overlay cabinets that already make the overlay look very small since the 1.5" planned overhang is measured from the box, not the front of the drawers. Note how small the overhang looks to the drawers. And then of course, they had templated for a 1.5" overhang and I only got 1.25" UGH! Every quarter inch there would have made the reveal on the side of the fridge less. Suggestions appreciated! I'm hoping that I will eventually make peace in my mind with this issue and won't notice it but it is driving me crazy right now. I think of all the things that screwed up just because of this one error by the KD that I didn't catch and I am beating myself up for it!...See MoreHeather S.D.
3 years agoHeather S.D.
3 years agoKatie B.
3 years agoHeather S.D.
3 years agoJoseph Corlett, LLC
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3 years agoKatie B.
3 years agoHeather S.D.
3 years agoKathy Handy Ginter
3 years agoGranite City Services
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Heather S.D.Original Author