Mission complete

The countertop is finished! Here's a little picture walk-through of my project.

Here are the two sides of the kitchen before I started. You can see we've painted the cabinets white and the walls blue. The dingy off-white countertop really had to go.


The first step was the removal of the old stuff. Because of the way they put it in, I had to pry off the old laminate, then pry up all the particle board. Not an easy job, since it was NAILED in many places to the cabinets. Just FYI, if it had been installed right, I would only have had to undo some brackets and lift the whole old countertop off. Lucky me.


Here's the new piece of countertop after it was just laid up there by me and a friend who was giving me a hand. I thought it looked great as it was. Lots of counter space, and who needs a sink?


The step I was most nervous about was cutting the holes for the sink and the stove. The pictures below show how I did the sink. It actually went very well. I measured and remeasured about 50 times, but by the time I finished the cut, everything lined up perfectly.


I replaced the old sink and faucet while I was at it. Hooking up the new sink to the old drain pipe was a chore, though. It didn't line up in the same place as the old one, and it took a lot of work before everything connected without leaking.


Here's the finished product. I'm very pleased with it, and more importantly, so is Alexa. Check out my creative work with molding in the vertical corner. The corner had been so messed up by the old stuff, that I decided just to cover it up.


So, all that's left to renovate in the kitchen is the floor. Whew! That'll be another weekend many months from now.