Advice on Cabinets and Countertops

Before you begin buying cabinets for your basement remodel, you need to design a layout. We had very tight limited spacing to work with, so as a result time spent on the layout took longer than expected. We first decided what type of cabinets we wanted. We were putting these cabinets in the recreational part of the basement, so we did not want to put in very expensive cabinets. We looked at both Lowes and Home Depot for the cabinets. They have a very nice selection of in stock and custom cabinetry. There are many other stores that you can buy cabinetry from, but Lowes and Home Depot had the best inventory with the best prices. We decided to go with the in stock choices, because of price and time frame. We could have gone with custom cabinetry, but the cost difference was significant and we needed the cabinets immediately.

We went online at both stores and found the sizes of their in stock cabinets and worked on the layout. We took some time, but we finally drew up the best possible layout within the limited spacing we had to work with. We layed out the cabinet sizes on a piece of graph paper and found out which sizes of cabinets worked best. We then went to the store and found all the right pieces. Luckily they had everything we needed. What was especially nice about these cabinets was that they are already pre-built with all the necessary hardware (hinges and handles). We had bought some cabinets from Lowes a few years earlier when we flipped a house, and they needed to be put together. The cabinets came in a flat box with all the necessary parts. Every piece and all the hardware needed to be put together. The cabinets turned out very nice, but this was a very time consuming project which we did not want to repeat.

Countertops can vary depending on price and durability. You can buy Formica, solid surface, granite, marble, tile, concrete, etc. After we had put in the cabinets in our basement, we took some time researching counters. We really like the looks of granite, but after checking out solid granite slabs, we realized they were a little pricey for our basement. You could check into buying remnants from granite stores. These are left over pieces from larger projects. Sometimes you can find a great buy. We could not find anything we liked, so we checked into something called Granite Transformations. They put thinner granite on top of existing counters. They look very nice and are far cheaper than regular granite, but they took six to eight weeks to have installed. We decided we would go that route. We did not have anything on the cabinets yet so my husband put plywood on top for a solid surface for which to install the Granite Transformations.

Weeks went by and we had yet to contact Granite Transformations, so I told my husband I was going to paint the plywood white for the time being to make it look a little nicer. So, I started painting the plywood, but did not like the looks of the edges, so I bought decorative trim to make the edges look better. I then put on two coats of pure white semi gloss paint. After I painted the counters white, we decided to wait a while for the new counters, so I decided to go one step further. I bought navy blue faux paint (navy blue is the accent color in our basement) and a wispy 4 inch paint brush and I faux painted on top of the white, using criss-cross strokes.