Kitchen Countertop

So I know I promised an update on the kitchen counter a while ago. Sorry for the delay. We've been so busy getting things finished around here in time for our Housewarming Party that we haven't had the time to keep up with our blogging. But you'll be seeing a flurry of updates in the coming week or so to catch you all up.

But back to the countertop...

So this is where we left off last time:

At this point we have to add the cement board on top of the plywood so that the tile mortar will have a proper surface to adhere to.

After making some measurements and cutting away for the sink here is what we are left with:

Now you screw this on top of the existing plywood and you are left with this:

You can begin to mix up your mortar, make your cuts and lay your tile. Check to see what sort of sink you have; you may have to buy a special drill bit to go through tile (like we did) to make a hole for the faucet. Some sinks have this hole already pre-cut so just double-check.

You'll notice that you can see the layers of material on the sides of the countertop. To cover this up we cut strips of leftover Granite tile 2" wide and then adjusted the wet saw to make 45 degree cut. We'll fill in the gap with grout a little later.

Since we had the mortar mixed we decided to knock out the backsplash that same day. For this we chose a simple white subway tile. We thought they would look great against the black granite and our bright white cabinets.

We let the tile dry over night and grouted the next day.

Once the grout is dry we installed our sink, faucet and water filtration system. The water filtration system works via Reverse Osmosis (which Kristen blogged about earlier). It was pretty easy to hook up. It gets its own faucet and has a tank that holds 10 gallons of filtered water. We love it and we're being a little greener by not buying bottled water every week.

Now that all of the hardware is in place, we added some under-counter lighting and some cabinet molding to hide the lights and ugly wires and this is what we're left with:

Pretty nice eh?