Lovin' the shiny and the retro
The countertops were installed today. What a difference a countertop makes! Before we had cream-colored tiles, which pretty much added nothing to our neutral-heavy room. But black? It even makes the “early American” cabinet hardware look good. Well, kind of. For now … until I get my chrome. Continue reading “Starry, starry night”
In one of my earlier posts, I detailed our current (ugly) cabinet hardware, and how disappointed I was to find out it was original to the house. It would have been easier to discard that cabinet hardware if it had been an 80s addition or the like. Continue reading “The hunt for the perfect chrome cabinet pull”
One of my biggest fears will come on the day that the custom countertop guy comes to install the Silestone. Why? One thing I never realized before is that the former owners had the new (ugly) tiled countertop dropped over the old countertop.
What if those countertops are the coolest retro thing I’ve ever seen? What if he pulls off the tile overlay and there exists something like this?
You know what I love most about this picture? See the “Early American” arrow cabinet hardware? See my earlier post about said cabinet hardware? Now do you see why my mind is flirting with the possibility that my kitchen may have looked like this back in 1953?
I know, I know, the Silestone is beautiful … and whatever’s underneath is surely ruined beyond repair from the new countertop existing (and being adhered too) the old one. I just can’t help but wonder.
I’m thinking I should be conveniently out of town when the countertop guy comes a’callin’. I don’t even want to know what I’m missing.
One of the decisions we tackled once our remodeling project became a reality was countertops. Currently we have the ugliness known as tiled countertops — cream-colored tile countertops whose grout is dissolving around the sink, and whose nooks and crannies harbor bacteria I don’t even want to think about. (I tend to just aim the Clorox spray, turn my head, and pray that all the little critters are obliterated upon contact.)
At first, I thought I wanted just a plain old Formica. I even flirted with the possibility of getting one of those fun retro boomerang Formicas, or the virr varr pattern. Then I came to my senses are realized that unless we were planning on staying in this house until we died, it probably wasn’t the wisest choice to go all-out retro. Gotta think about resale possibilities, after all.
How many mottled brown varieties of Formica can possibly exist? (A lot, it turns out.) I just sat and stared at all the gobs of samples on chains, realizing that I had absolutely no starting point. I had no colors picked out yet, so I couldn’t even narrow down the choices.
By the Formica display, however, was a beautiful, sparkly little gem: a sample of Silestone called Stellar Night. The online sample doesn’t do it justice, but here’s a shot I took of the sample at home:
Try to ignore the computer glare an think of a — well, stellar night. Black sky with little white/silver stars. That’s what this baby looks like. No matter how many samples I browsed through (Formica, marble, granite, etc), I kept coming back to this. It struck me as being a nice contract between 50s style and modern.
As I was soon to find out, however, having a black countertop severely limited my options for flooring … especially when I was planning on plunking down a red chrome table in the midst of said flooring.
The cabinet hardware we currently have has always struck me as ugly. It almost looked like something that came from a 70s or 80s obsession with everything cowboy.
I tried to imagine how they would look once the kitchen was redone, for we will be having kind of a black and white theme going on, and these cabinets (original to the house) will be painted white. Sure, I’d love to get new cabinets. But, ah, there’s a little bit of a price issue there.
So the other day I was browsing through my new bible — a 1957 Sears catalog that I snagged off eBay, and lo and behold, I find this:
Turns out that the ugly arrows are original to the house. Argh! How I wanted to get rid of them and replace them with chrome, but now I’m rethinking it. (Just for the record, we do NOT have the hinges with the straps. Thank god for that; it would be entirely too much.) No surprise, these are “Early American” style — back when people weren’t sure whether to decorate with a modern flair or cling to the days of yore, so they tended to do a little bit of both.
