A Chronicle of our Family's Adventure in Real Estate.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Utilities are a Necessity

   It's been a while since I've posted.  This is due to lack of progress on the house and lack of creativity on my part. I'm sure I could have come up with something to write about, but that would have required 1) effort and 2) a strain on my brain. If I were to engage in either one of those activities I or my children may not live to tell about it. 
     Our contractor, Brian is dutifully filling our walls with electrical wire and plumbing pipes.  Unfortunately, neither of those things are very useful unless there is actually electricity to run through the wire and water to run through the pipe.  The good news is that we got electricity last Monday.  Yeah!!!  The bad news is that when we ran the water it ran for about 15 minutes and then the well ran dry.  Boooo!!.  With the Thanksgiving Holiday in full swing last week, we were unable to get the well looked at until yesterday.  The latest good news is the well is producing enough water for the house.  We were running it at a faster rate, so it ran out sooner than expected.  We may need to get a holding tank to make sure we don't run out mid shower, but the well driller felt that we had enough to keep the household running.  Now we need to check the water quality to make sure the water doesn't ruin the instant hot water heater.  If we have hard water (which is very likely), we will have to install a water softener to insure we don't get build up in the instant hot water heater.  What? Another appliance to spend money on?  Of course I want it!  Once we get the water tested and properly softened.  We can start running the water through the Pex Tubes and voila, we will have heat!  Our contractor will be very excited to have both heat and electricity.  He's been working in less than ideal conditions these past few weeks.  We'll be having major labor negotiations if we don't start providing him with some basic creature comforts pretty soon. 
     Some of the drywall has been installed on the 2nd level to have a surface for the insulation to sit on when it is put in the attic. 




 Here is a Pinterest craft that I've made for Christmas.  It's an advent countdown board that I will clip small gift, Christmas verses, and Christmas activities for us do during the Christmas season. 



I was inspired by this Pin.
 I think working on my photo taking abilities, lighting techniques, and maybe actually hanging it up will improve the wow factor of my little craft.  We're back to that whole "effort" thing again.  Maybe next year?  Any other fun Christmas crafts out there or are you focused on the edible Christmas treats?  We'll be making some of those next week! 
 
 

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Counter Culture



Counter tops are expensive!  Almost as expensive as the rest of our entire kitchen put together including appliances.  Who knew?  We've redone 3 kitchens previously and in each of them we chose laminate counter tops.  I liked them.  They did their job and the cost was extremely reasonable.
Kitchen counter in our house at W. William St.    



In our current house we have laminate for our counters along with a butcher block top for our island.


Current House
 I think the laminate has worked in these houses for two reasons. 
     1. The kitchen counter space is not a large amount of square footage.
     2. The price point of the houses did not call for a high end surface.
  I really like the mix of the butcher block and laminate in our current house.  The butcher block was bought on the cheap at Ikea.  I think we got a 40"x72" (20 Square feet) for around $130.00.  That doesn't include the cost to drive there, but I love Ikea, so the trip worth the gas money.  It ended up being around $6.50 per square foot.  Not bad once you look at the other options available out there.  Let me put that $6.50 in perspective.  Here is what we are going to pay for some other counter top options.
Laminate $23.00 a square foot installed + tax
Corian (Solid Surface) $ 59.00-89.00 a square foot installed (there were some cheaper options, but I didn't like them.)
Quartz $54.00 -89.00 a square foot installed
Granite $49.00-89.00 a square foot installed
  I learned a  couple of things during my research.  Granite, Corian (solid surface counter tops), and Quartz are not subject to sales tax (at least in New York State) because it is considered a capital improvement.  Laminate is subject to sales tax.   I also learned the pros and cons to these different materials.  I know many people who have each of these and are happy with their choices, so I am not going to bore you with my take on the benefits or drawbacks of any of these. Have your counter top and cook on it too! To be honest with you I really wanted concrete counter tops, but for several reasons we felt our money, energy, and time would be better spent on other projects.  Really we just didn't want to screw them up.
   We will have about 75 square feet of counter surface.  We quickly realized that any material we chose would be A LOT of money.  We considered doing the butcher block from IKEA, but since we are doing an extra deep peninsula to accommodate for seating we would have to seam it in the middle.  Neither one of us was thrilled with the amount of seams it would require.  We are planning on using the butcher block in our mudroom area since the space is smaller and won't require any seams.
  We then looked at laminate.  The cost by far was the best, but we didn't think that amount of laminate would add value to our kitchen.  We would rather pinch a few pennies in the flooring department for the bathrooms and put something a little nicer on our counters.
   After checking out Lowes and Home Depot we found that there were a few options in Granite that were cheaper than Corian and Quartz. I never would have thought that, but apparently Granite is so 2010 it's being put on the clearance rack.
This is Lowes most affordable option.
I liked the pattern of this granite, but I thought the black and white would make the kitchen look too sterile, but I was willing to settle to save $1,000.  Good thing Dan scoured Craig's List.  We found Granite Creations by Anthony.  He had some lovely pieces of stone starting at $40.00 a sq. ft.  We walked away with these 2 samples.

Yvara ($50.00 sq. ft)

Santa Cecelia $45.00 ( I have no idea if this is how it's really spelled.)
Being the discriminating consumers that we are we quickly decided to go with the cheapest option.  I don't think anyone is really surprised by this news.  It does help that we all preferred the Santa Cecelia.  It had a warm neutral tone to it, and I hope it will it better match the rest of the decor.

 I'm sorry if you wasted some of your very valuable time reading about our counter top decision making process. I will make it up to you with a good cup of coffee and my newly famous pumpkin cake.  Have any of you  made a counter top choice recently?  How did it all work out?  In other house related news, we should be getting electric service this week.  I can't wait for lights and heat!