Bar Counter Top Extravaganza!

When we bought this house, there was a small opening in the wall between the kitchen and the living room. In this opening was a small granite counter. You might remember from the "before" video that the counters all had a rough edge.

Here it is close up.


Notice the hand chipped edge. (very rustic)


We had our granite guy come and smooth out the edges so they looked nice like this.


The granite guy decided to remove the piece in the opening and smooth it out while it was off the wall. Well, it broke. He offered to replace it and then suggested we make the opening bigger. He even offered to make it 18 inces wide like a bar top. We took him seriously and opened the whole wall up.


We even went to his workshop in Gardena and chose a granite color for the bar counter top from his scrap pieces of granite. We decided to go with a darker color that would play off the dark tones in the other granite and work with some of the colors in the living room. Here are the two granite samples next to each other. The existing color is on the left and the bar counter is on the right. The brown tones will match our couch and flooring nicely.


Here is the crazy part of the story:

We could not get a hold of the granite guy when we tried to have our new counter delivered. All of his numbers were not working. He literally fell off the face of the earth. My mother-in-law (Mom 2 as I call her) decided we should drive down to his shop (since we actually knew where it was) and see what was going on. When we got there, we spoke to a man who was working. Good thing mom 2 speaks Spanish. We asked what happened to the main guy. He didn't seem to really know.

I looked at the counter he was working on and realized it was ours (shocker!). I asked for a tape measure and noticed that it was 8 feet long instead of 88 inches like we requested (I originally told the granite guy to write down the measurements but he did not... He said he would remember them..). This nice man at the shop said he would cut it shorter and that it would be ready by 1:00pm. Somehow he believed that this counter top belonged to us. I guess we look very trustworthy.

So we went to target (2 different locations), had lunch at Red Robin (My fav), and went back to the shop at 1:00pm.

They were just finishing polishing it up when we got there. Rather than wait for them to bring the counter and install it, we decided to grab it and go (everything had been paid for anyway).

Here it is in the back of the car.


I had to get the area ready where the counter would go. Here are the brackets that we chose.


Plywood goes under the granite. We stained the bottom brown since it is slightly visible while sitting on the couch in the living room. This way it will not be noticed easily.


The plywood gets attached to the top of the wall.


It took all four of us to hoist this thing on the wall. This picture is staged since Laura had to step away to take it. It must weigh about 200 pounds. Underneath I put some construction adhesive even though it probably would not be coming off that wall ever. The top slips right over the plywood. The edge hides the plywood nicely (the edge of the counter is twice as thick as the main part).


Doesn't it look great?


Here is the side view.


And now from the kitchen. We love it! This is where we will be eating since there is no room for a dining room table in this cute little house.

So that is our crazy story about the counter top that just happened to be made the day we decided to randomly show up at the shop that did not know we were coming. And, they actually gave it to us. How did that happen? I thought we were going to be eating off of a plywood counter for a while. We are just so glad it is here!

We hope you will come and dine with us in the near future and help us enjoy this miraculous addition to our home.