Black Friday is a very exciting time for me. I have so much fun looking at the sales and get a flutter in my heart when I see how discounted some items can be. It’s the perfect time to purchase something you’ve wanted or needed but didn’t want to pay full price and I love the thrill of a steal.
I also love the energy of a Black Friday experience. Some people dislike it, and I get that too. But we go out every Black Friday. We have a routine: baseball caps and Starbucks, then a random assortment of stores punctuated with a fast food lunch. Don’t ask me how we developed this tradition but it started when we were engaged and we love it.
We recently got a Menards in the city where we live. We had no idea what we were in for. If you’ve never seen one the store is massive and consists only of the box building, concrete floors and shelves – of every imaginable household item. It’s the Sam’s Club of home improvement, only bigger. It was amazing for me because we’re renovating a house but for my husband it might as well have been Christmas that very day. We spent two hours there, literally, just walking around and taking it in.
Whilst walking the aisles of said store I stopped at a sign for stock laminate countertop. They looked better than the laminate I remembered from some of my family’s old houses growing up and better than what was still in our current home (remember the powder blue?). The price was ridiculously cheap.
It ended up costing us less than $250 for 20 feet of countertop, color matching silicone, and a custom-ordered island. If you’ve shopped for countertop, even the laminate stuff, you know this is a good deal. And since I knew I wasn’t going to be able to renovate my entire kitchen soon, this would definitely improve the look of the room in the meantime without costing a fortune.
That’s the day Menards and I became friends.
The countertop sat in our garage for months. First of all it was the holidays and no one wants to work during the holidays. Also, it was cold. It’s hard to get motivated when all you want to do is hibernate. The husband started the project one day after I pointed out that we had spent money that was just sitting around not being utilized, and an ugly kitchen that was causing me anxiety.
Soon after he started he realized two people were needed for the job and we called in a reinforcement in the form of my dad. It took them almost all day to measure, cut, fit and mount the countertop. Since we had purchased stock pieces they were not pre-trimmed to fit our cabinet lengths (except for the specially ordered island) and the pieces that met at a corner had to be wood glued together perfectly. These guys are my heroes because once the countertop were secured in place and the matching silicone was filled in, you couldn’t even tell it was a DIY job.
The final step was installation of the new sink, which I also had purchased during Black Friday on a deal. Our old one was not only very, very worn from the previous owners (surprise!) but it was only 6 inches deep – which meant every time I washed anything the counter and floor got wet too. There are very few things as frustrating…
After cutting a hole in the new countertop with almost no margin for error, my other half reattached the plumbing and made the seals watertight using silicone. He’s a handy guy to have around!
The next photo is a “before” – mid backsplash project (previous post) and for full effect of the countertops we had before:
Oh, I forgot to mention I also had bought a new dishwasher on Black Friday. (I told you I was a fan of this sales day!) The old one was, you guessed it, original to the house and I never felt like it was cleaning well. Dishes would come out with spots and sometimes food still on them. Gross.
This is an “after”:
The color contrast is pretty stark here. In person it blends much better, but those cabinets – ai yi yi. I at least need to paint them.
All in all, this project was a lot of work but now we feel we at least have a sink and dishwasher that clean, countertops that aren’t grandma powder blue, and don’t feel like it is always dirty with that white tile and grout backsplash. This should carry us through a couple of years until we know what we want to do in the future in the kitchen and have the funds to do it. Goodbye powder blue and scraped up, shallow sink!
More projects on the way soon.
Not Tomorrow 