Picking a Countertop

To be honest, kitchens are not my "thing."  I'm not a huge fan of cooking so when it came to designing this kitchen it took an excessive amount of houzz.com browsing.  A year ago, I did take an interior design class, which may have helped me figure out my style a little.  But the one thing from the beginning that I knew I wanted for sure, was a counter top that looked like "cookies and cream ice cream."  Don't ask me why...  I'm not even sure where I got the idea, but I just knew I wanted it.

Besides the look, I was open to other ideas like recycled glass counters, cement, man made quartz, or quartzite.  But as I shopped I found out that these options were actually either more expensive than granite, too soft, or too complicated for us.  We really wanted whatever will hold up the best with the least amount of maintenance and still look awesome.

So once it came down to picking a countertop it seemed like the samples of everything at the big box stores were sooooo boring!  I'm talking cookies and cream put in a blender for 15 minutes boring. Where's the texture?

Dean and I went on MANY trips to the stone stores on State College Blvd in Anaheim and saw a few stones I liked.  

Here are some I was pretty excited about.  

Labrodorite Granite

Cambria Quartz

White Fantasy Quarzite

But as you can see, none exactly were a "cookies and cream" look and they were at the top of our countertop budget.  Even though normally I'm a sucker for blue, we really don't want blues, or browns in this kitchen either.

Before zeroing in on the winning slab I found a store that carried pre-fab slabs.  These are basically countertops that are cut into one long countertop shape with the edges already done.  They had these perfect "cookies and cream" slabs of Viscount White.  I had found The ONE!

I remembered seeing a whole slab of something that was pretty similar to this at one of the previous stores but had breezed right past it.  I thought I'd go back and see if it was the same.

Brian, this time, went with me to check out the slab, and it too was Viscount White.  The sales person explained to us how the prefab slab wouldn't work on an island, which totally made sense.  So we realized the whole slab was the way to go.

The slab was slightly less expensive than the prefab at the other place.  In the end we think this will work out better too because we can choose the edge style. We weren't a fan of the rounded edge on the prefab so that's a nice bonus.

They called over the forklift and moved three slabs out for us to choose from.  It was a blazing 100 degrees outside so we couldn't dwell too long over the decision.  They were all very similar anyway.  I only managed to take about three pictures because I thought I was going to faint from the heat.  haha.  Here is the final choice!  It was fun writing our name on the sold sticker.  :D

The countertop picking process was just like picking a wedding dress, but for the kitchen, so I'm glad to be done with this part of the project.  I can't wait for install day!