Kitchen Counter Redo, day 2 (and 3, and 4)

Saturday morning, we woke up bright and early to tackle our too-big-hole problem. Our (ok, my) bright idea involved cutting a horseshoe shaped pieces from the old island counter that has been living in our garage since it was replace last november with the vastly prettier butcher block. So, in order to facilitate this, I needed to trace the sink size, like so:

And then traced that onto the old counter, which we set up on saw horses in the basement. Then I used the sink guide that came with the sink to trace the inside line. And then I left poor Matt to cut it out with a jig saw while I ran to Home Depot for some supplies. Well, he did a great job, but what with all that tracing and it being a horseshoe shape, well, it didn't quite fit right:

Actually, the picture makes it look worse than it was, it did fit, it just stuck out and when we measured it, it ended up making the hole too small anyway. So we went with vastly improved and much simpler plan of just building out two sides

Or course, we also had to build out below the little bits of counter so that it was actually supported. It took longer than I'd like to admit to get to the step you see in the picture above, but gosh darn it, we got there.

That being done, it was time to move on to the big show, putting down the base coat and the paint chips. Now, this was stressful because you only have 20 minutes to apply the chips once the base coat goes down, so I don't have any pictures of the "during" but here's what we ended up with at the end of the day Saturday:

Then we have to leave it sit overnight to let the basecoat cure and make sure the chips stuck. On Sunday we got up and proceeded by scraping off the excess chips (and vacuuming up the loose ones) so we could put on the topcoat (after another copious round of sanding with the provided tools).

We were on schedule, all ready to go, but as I was wiping everything down to get up the last of the dust, tragedy struck. You could still see the old counter through the new cover. Now, I don't know if we overthought things, or didn't put down enough basecoat, or going from white to dark brown was just too much, but honestly, you could clearly see the old counter and I knew it was going to bother us forevermore. So after some dejected fuming and a brief look at what new counters would cost (more than we wanted to spend, even for new formica) we did the only thing we could think of and, that's right, went back to square one. We bought another kit and, rinse, lather, repeat, we applied another basecoat, let it sit overnight, scraped and sanded and finally got around to putting on the clear stuff Monday night (after, I might add, a patch session that put us starting the project at midnight)

But, despite the lack of sleep, the heart ache, the extra money for another kit, and the persistent feeling that we must be some kind of idiots to screw up an idiot-proof kit, it looks lovely and we are very happy with it. Next steps are to take off the tape and let it cure for a week, which puts us getting the sink in just before Wayne and Gina have to head back to Marlyand. Wheeew.