If there's any New Years resolution I'd like to make this year, it's to have less crappy stuff.

Last year, I graduated into adulthood by purchasing a real, made from wood, dining room table. You may laugh, but it's the first time in my adult life that I feel that if I were to move tomorrow I might actually take my kitchen table with me rather than leave it on the side of the road. I love my new table so much I want to get it pregnant and have a set of chairs that I love equally well. I'm not quite there yet. I like my chairs, but I don't love my chairs.

This weekend, we made another stride forward by changing the countertops. Whoever decorated the house before we moved into it either did it in 1979 or really, really loved the color pee yellow. The floors were yellow, the wallpaper was yellow, and the countertops were yellow. This yellow, in fact:


We fixed the floors and the walls right away when we moved in, but put the countertops off because it would be too expensive. I have hated these countertops with a red hot fiery hatred for ten years but whenever we talked about changing them and figured out the square footage of our rather large kitchen, suddenly things like food and heat became more important than purchasing the really cool granite countertops I wanted.

Around New Years Day, we decided we could live with it no longer. The KingofHearts had figured out a way to resurface the existing countertops with new, less offensive laminate for a fraction of the price of replacing them altogether. He even test drove it on someone else's kitchen, so I was convinced. There was nothing wrong with the countertops per se... they were solid... just solidly ugly... and the finish on the laminate had gotten so bad it was hard to keep them clean.

For all the grief I give The KoH for his tool obsessions and unfinished projects, it's really nice to have someone around who can turn this:


Into this:


We ended up cheaping out and purchasing the laminate they carried in the big box home improvement store rather than ordering something really nice, paying more and waiting weeks for it to come in, then having the big box home improvement store sell it to someone else. (Can you tell we've been through this before?) Partially because even if we had ordered it, I didn't really see anything in their catalog that I liked enough to wait that long for. As for the in-store stock, they had four kinds of ugly and one kind of I can live with it so we chose I can live with it. I'd gotten to the point where I just wanted it done and anything would be an improvement.


I didn't think I really liked this, but in the kitchen and with the cabinets, I looks a lot better than I expected. I think the cabinets need a fresh coat of paint now, maybe a warmer shade of brown, but I'm willing to live with it until that can happen. It is such an improvement.


Yes, that's a new sink too. One with a basin so deep I have to resist the urge to dive in when ever I get close to it. I can put a big stock pot in that sink and still have room to fill it with water, and then move the faucet back and forth if I wanted to. I can even wash the stock pot without splattering water all over the counter. Not that I would ever wash a stock pot by hand... I'm just sayin'. I feel like I work on the dish line of a high volume restaurant. Plus this sink can double as a swimming pool when The Caterpillar learns to swim.

My last task is to hunt down some tile for a back splash. Any suggestions?