Kitchen Renovation: The countertop

Hello friends,

For our fist post we will share the do’s and don’ts of our DYI kitchen remodel on a budget.

First things first, your wife must get up early and look for things on Pinterest that she likes, then come to you and say let’s to this even though we have no experience.

Really we started months ago while looking through Home Depot picking color schemes and designs. Knowing we wanted a more updated kitchen but did not want to spend $7,000-$10,000.

This is our story of how we remodeled our kitchen on a budget. After researching the most cost-effective and time efficient way to create the style we were looking for, we decided on a concrete counter top right over the Formica counter top. Which of course snowballed into wanting to change the backsplash and cabinet color. (I wish we thought to take "before" pictures, but we found this picture of our friends in the old kitchen)

I thought removing the old backsplash was going to be easy and I was going to be able to use the old drywall, I was wrong. I had to remove the drywall and then replace it with dura rock and then tape and mud the seams so the area was flat. (We wanted all the sanding to be completed at once...So we did the drywall and sanded the Formica before we completed the countertops. We did this because Chelsie was tired of living in dust and plastic)

After walls were back in place we sanded the drywall mud and countertop and cabinets all at the same time with 220 sanding screen. (I suggested putting up some kind is plastic drop cloth to keep dust in kitchen) it’s going to be dusty. But we will get to that later. Back to the countertop...

To make room for the countertop we also had to remove the old cast iron porcelain sink from the counter, but we did not measure the hole in the countertop. This is came back to kick us in the end. **This is research I would suggest completing before starting your project. Apparently a stainless steel sink (although cheaper) installs differently than cast iron. We had purchased our sink and weren't ready to install it until AFTER the counter tops were complete. More on that later.

With the sink removed, oven and refrigerator pulled away from the wall we start with our first light coat of concrete. We use the same as the Pinterest account recommended and it was conveniently located at Home Depot “Henry’s feather finish concrete.”

You should put this on in light coats as evenly spread as possible. Once it dries in three hours sand with 220 sandpaper or sanding screen no sander needed, we used our hands.

Repeat this step with a slightly thicker coat. We repeated this step five times. But the third time we started to cover the edges of the counter not sanding completely smooth to give a uneven stone look finish. Note that this stuff dries quickly, I would mix one cup of concrete to one cup of water and adding additional water or concrete until I had a consistency of peanut butter.

Once you are done with the concrete you must realize that concrete is a porous material so to prevent staining from different spills we added “511 penetrator.” We put three coats on our countertop then you have to let set in for 24 hours.

On our last step we add “Safecoat acrylic” gloss finish, we put 4 coats of this on the top of the counter. Dry time between coats is 15 minutes but we did not put pots or pans on it for 12 hours. For this I would recommend the sponge brush or a non heated sprayer over a paintbrush so there are no streaks.

#lifelessons #growing #plants