With the kitchen beginning to enter the 21st century after a couple projects (see the first one and the second one), it was time to replace our old - dare I say original to the house - white and green Formica countertops with something a little more... ummm... not out of a 70's sitcom. Here you can see the original countertops:

The original white with speckled green Formica, after the cabinets have been painted white.
When people talk countertops on home improvement shows (my favorite of which being Flip That House) the conversation usually starts with granite, with possible mentions of other materials like ceramic tile, engineered stone, or even concrete. In real life, our conversation didn't seriously get much past laminate, pretty much for cost reasons.

Our original plan was to go with the ready to install pre-fabricated laminate countertops that get screwed into the bottom cabinets, but do to a "quirk" in the house (and I use the nicest word possible), the top of our cabinets - to which the Formica was glued on top of - was simply a piece of plywood nailed into the sides of the cabinets. At that point, we could a) rip the plywood off the cabinets and likely destroy them in the process, or b) peel the Formica of the plywood and leave the cabinets intact. To make things easy on ourselves, we went with the second option.

Demo time. The old Formica was glued down pretty well, but ultimately, it was no match for hammers and a little elbow grease. After sanding and puttying up some holes, we were left with a blank canvas.

Going from pic 1 to pic 2, you may have noticed that we had already ripped off the laminate backsplash and painted the wall green.
So, instead of going with the pre-fabricated laminate counters, we switched gears and bought two 8-foot laminate sheets at Lowes, which looked something like this (although they weren't white).

Researching the topic, I was excited to find out that laminate sheets can be cut with special utility blades and a utility knife. Perfect! I didn’t any electric saws at the time, so that was a nice break.

However, I found out a valuable lesson after giving the utility knife thing a go. Unless you are Hercules, or a descendent from another deity, it is damn near impossible to cut laminate with a knife. After making a few weak scratches in the sheets, I gave up, measured everything out, brought them to my father-in-law’s house, and had him cut it all to size with his table saw. 10 minutes later, that was done.

The next step was to glue all of the cut sheets onto the plywood base with something that smelled like triple-strength airplane glue. It is potent. It also bonds on contact, so it's important not to screw it up. I'm a screw it up kind of home improvement guy, so this worried me a little, but with some clever use of dowels and a steady hand, we were able to get the sheets glued on almost straight.

Not my house, but this is what you can expect from the gluing process.



After the sheets have been glued and have dried
Next step was to cut a hole in the laminate for the sink, which was right in the middle of the countertop pictured above. Easy? With the right tools, probably. Instead, the best thing I could get my hands on was an old, rusty jigsaw. As this thing tore through the laminate, sending cracks for inches in every direction, all I could think about was ruining all of the hard work we put into this project so far. Fortunately all of the cracks stopped before they got to where the laminate met the plywood and I was able to get a clean hole for the sink.

Plumbing

While we were replacing the countertops, it seemed like a good time to install a new stainless steel sink and faucet. The sink was the same size as the original one (according to the dimensions on the box). As it turns out, it was ever so slightly bigger and required a little extra cutting and muscle to squeeze it into the space. And it was 8 inches deep instead of 7, giving us a little extra room to do the dishes. I was surprised how easy the sink went in and hooked back up to all the plumbing. Man, plumbers have it easy.


A new sink and facet (second attempt). I've spared you the plumber's shots of myself under the sink.

Oh wait, maybe plumbing isn't that easy. The sink started leaking and, surprsie, surprise, I had forgot to seal the strainer basket to the sink with plumber's putty. Attempt 2 to install the sink was more successful.

The Finish

Finishing the job went smoothly and was the most fun (i.e. only fun) part of the project, probably because I had the correct tool for the job. My parents had given me a router tool for Christmas and it was my first chance to use it. After running the router over the edges, the corners actually looked professionally done. Between the table saw, jig saw, and router, it was a good lesson on how much easier things can be done with the correct tools. Here is the finished countertops with the sink:


This was easily the most difficult home improvement project I'd done to date, but I was really impressed with the results. If you're looking for a how to on laminate countertops like this, the best one I found on the internet was this one from Ace Hardware.