Before, After, and After

When I arrived back home to Houston in June, I wasn’t planning to re-do my kitchen.  I knew I hated my stained, pitted, cracked, and otherwise despicable concrete counters, but I assumed I could live with them.  This townhouse is only a temporary gig, and we aren’t here all that much.  But then….

My front door broke.

Yep. It’s broke.

I knew I couldn’t live with that.  SO I was forced to call my oh-so-handy handy man.  When he came to deal with the door, his T-shirt mentioned that he also did granite counters.  Hmmmm.  You see where this is going.  I casually asked him if there were any possible way he could replace my counters and backsplash in the few short weeks I was going to be in Houston.  Guess what?  He could!  So that’s how I went from this

and this

to this

Yea!  Shiny, clean granite!  Sooooo much  better than the dirty concrete!  And now, the next step was the backsplash.

So I went to a nice little tile shop and decided to splurge on a glass tile backsplash that I thought was gorgeous.  I loved it.  So Handy Man put it up.  The whole thing.  And then he took the protective paper off the counters and I saw them with the splash and I didn’t love it so much.  And neither did my two kids who weighed in.  And neither did my sister, via iphone pics.  I pretty much had a mini-melt-down all by myself the night I was supposed to be picking out grout color so that the backsplash could be permanently affixed to my kitchen walls.  Mark was in New York and I might have freaked out to him via electronic message that I was having a Backsplash Crisis, and that sweet man told me to just pick another one.  Just like that.  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  I don’t know what I did in a previous life to deserve this man, but I can assure you it was infinitely better than anything I have done in this life.    So that’s how I went from this

to this

I like my kitchen so much better now.

But I’m still waiting for my new front door.  Turns out it takes a lot longer to have a door made than it does to have counter tops made.  Now you know.

So that was my little remodel adventure for this summer.  Anyone else ever made a bad choice in a similar situation?  Did you live with it, or did you start over?