Kitchen Renovation - Part 3/6

The kitchen is actually starting to come together and we're getting a sense of what the final product will look like. The kitchen contractor has put in all the cabinets, installed the microwave range hood, fixed the floor and started putting some tiles in. The texture guy and Jai patched up some of the holes in the kitchen walls, and the texture guy also plastered and textured the kitchen. Last week we got the skylight and recessed lighting installed. Yesterday we got the granite counters installed and they look amazing! :) The stone we ended up using is called Shalimar Gold. It looked so nice that the granite guys took a ton of pictures with it after they were done and they wanted to keep the scraps to make their bathroom vanity. We're possibly going to use it for that too so we kept the extra 7 feet we ended up with.

I ordered a gas range from Home Depot that should arrive on Friday. It took a while to decide on the range I wanted. I like gas cooktops, so we were considering getting a dual fuel cell range at first. Those are pretty expensive and I don't bake as much as I use the stove, so I ended up looking for an all gas range, but one that had convection heating for the oven. At first I was going to get the Maytag MGR6875ADS (sadly I have all these product codes memorized). It has two ovens, convection heating for the big one, 5 burners and it's self-cleaning. It was also a pretty good price at Home Depot and even cheaper through an online store (no CA pay-though-the-nose sales tax!). But we had our eyes on another range that we saw at Home Depot one day, the GE Profile PGB975SEMSS. It has all the same features as the Maytag one, but some are slightly better (e.g. more powerful burners), and it looks WAAY nicer. Home Depot ended up having a 10% appliance sale the day after I ordered the Maytag one, so I went back and ended up upgrading to the one we liked more since it ended up being a $200 difference. :)

The range will also go better with the microwave we picked, the GE JVM1750SMSS, which had decent reviews online so we just went with it. Less research time was spent on the microwave, since we were pressed to get that ordered in time to install with the cabinets. All this appliance-purchasing sounds like a breeze but it involved some arm-twisting to get our new home-owner discounts and having to drive to various stores or all the way to San Francisco once to get the microwave.

The faucet is another piece of hardware that required careful research. We wanted a brushed steel/nickel appearance to match with our appliances. We also have a slightly unusual set-up with our cabinets on the sink side, so we couldn't go with a tall faucet. Our sink is also big, but since one side is too large to allow a faucet to be installed in front of it, the faucet would have to have enough range from its offset location to reach the big sink. AND we wanted something with an extendable hose. After looking at a bunch of different faucets, and going to 3 Home Depot stores, I bought the Delta Uptown 16928-SSSD faucet. It's short, has a long handle, has a pull-out handle, has a brushed stainless steel finish and is $90 less than our budget for the faucet. :)It had good user reviews too so we were sold.