How to Find Less Expensive Granite Kitchen Countertops
Since we are selling our house, we're upgrading the kitchen. I wish we had done this sooner, but at least we're going to be able to have brand-new granite tile counters for the listing.
The tile installers are coming on Thursday and Friday of this week to install the tile backsplash and granite tile countertops. Thank goodness we finally found a tile that worked within our budget! I have to admit, I needed help with this.
We knew we wanted granite tile (still granite but less expensive than slabs), so we went shopping, put together some ceramic tile for the backsplash, found some hardware, and chose a granite tile. It's beautiful. But at $12 a square foot, plus installation, it was outside of our price range. Even with the drastic discount from slab granite ($80 a square foot, installed), we couldn't get the price low enough. Everything else that we looked at that was in the price range was ugly.
So I got a referral to a staging expert, Cheryl Petrie of Petrie Productions, and man, she's awesome. Cheryl, our amazing decorator, went shopping for us (which, more impressively, she did it for free) and found this. It's porcelain tile, beautiful color, and it's only $3.50 a square foot.
Brilliant.
Except that it wouldn't have a good edge and we would lose the whole "G-word" factor. So we resigned ourselves to the expensive stuff.
But Cheryl, ever vigilant, went shopping for us again (also for free) and found this.
Granite tile, in our color palette, only $6.25 a square foot! Excellent!
So that's what they're putting in Thursday and Friday.
Oh yeah, and here's the best part of all. While she was here, I showed her our kitchen lights, which are hideous: She agreed that they were hideous. But I explained that we'd looked and the boxes were in exactly the wrong spot for putting in a different fixture (off center and out of alignment) and that we couldn't afford to redo wiring to move them and put pendants over the island (the ideal choice) and that we didn't have the headroom for recessed lighting. So we were stuck with them.
And what did Cheryl say? Track lighting.
Of course, my response was fairly predictable. I thought she was out of her mind. I asked her, “Are you kidding me?”
No, she wasn't kidding. She told me to go to a couple of the big box stores and look because there's new track lighting that's affordable and charming. This is what I found. Is she a genius or is she a genius?
