Countertops DONE!

***Cue harp music***

Look at that - real, grownup countertops!  To accomplish this, we had a rare sighting in our house: a professional. Auntie Noelle Gauthier, kitchen designer extraordinaire at Hancock Lumber in Bridgton, Maine, set us up with Greg Smith of Stone Surface, also in Bridgton.

It wasn't a tremendous amount of square footage, but we did challenge him with our sink that's shaped roughly like a marshmallow.  Even the straight-looking parts aren't really that straight, as it turns out. Back in the day, this baby would have been probably mounted directly to the wall and/or propped up on legs with a table or something next to it.  None of this fancy built-in stuff.  So, yeah.  We didn't make it easy on poor Greg by asking him to deal with the slightly flared back corner, rounded front protrusion, windowsill, large gap between the sink and the wall, etc.  But he pretty much nailed it.  Once we figured it all out as he made a template, he made the actual installation look easy.  The whole installation process didn't take much more than an hour.

Here's how it went together behind the sink - we set the sink away from the wall so that the rounded front wouldn't create an awkward slop-collecting nook where it sat on top of the cabinet.  Also, it looks badass.

To support the vertical pieces, Greg cut the counter in such a way that there was a couple inches of the horizontal piece behind the sink.  (The excess white goop was wiped off and dried clear. Then the vertical pieces support the magnificent windowsill, upon which we will keep our collection of kitchen herbs.  Someday.

Is that a sexy windowsill or what?

The top of the windowsill is flush with the top of the sink, and the windowsill overhangs its support pieces by an inch or so for extra detail.

We got a backsplash out of the deal too.

Daaaayuummmm!

The stone is called Delicatus and in real life, it's got lots of colors - greenish, garnet spots, some streaks of rust, and it's very three-dimensional.  Greg said something about drinking a glass of wine and staring at it.  I guess that's what stone guys do in their spare time. Now that's passion! It looks fabulous, it was beautifully installed, and we can't believe it's actually in our kitchen.  Now that we've got this plus butcher block on the island, we can officially check countertops off the list! Yee-haw! Thanks to Noelle and Greg!