Harold's Renovation Blog: #72: Welp, There Goes The Living Room!

What we thought would be an easy swap of an old sectional for a new sofa has turned our living room on its head (and one of us is more thrilled about that than the other). So this week we’re sharing how we’re rethinking the layout and reinventing the space to work a little harder. We’re also sharing a full pro & con breakdown when it comes to countertop materials, since we’ve lived with three different kitchens with three different countertop choices. We’ve loved them all, but not entirely, so you can hear our regrets to hopefully avoid making the same mistakes. Plus, I ran into some hiccups in my whole meal-kit-delivery experiment that may have me falling out of love with them for good.

You can download this episode from Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio – or listen to it below! Then use this page to check out any links, notes, or photos we referenced. Note: If you’re reading in a feed reader, you might have to click through to the post to see the player.

What’s New

That picture above is a sneak peek of our updated living room with our new sofa that we bought from Crate & Barrel. We did the 93″ length and the steel fabric (which looks much darker on the site than it does in real life). We’ll share more photos and details in a full post soon, but the sun set on us before we could get all of the photos we wanted (thanks daylight savings time!).
These are the new chairs we got from Target (which are on sale right now) to fill out the seating area, and the side tables are also from Target, although we’re thinking we might eventually get something larger that can hold a lamp (and then we’ll move these to the beach house).
Below is one of the Plated meals we were able to salvage. It was a Roasted Vegetable Tikka and it was delicious and very filling.

Kitchen Counters

Above you can see the Cambria quartz counters that we bought for our kitchen island (in Brittanicca, one of their most marble-like design). We’re just as in love with it as the day it got installed and have had no maintenance issues!
Below is our perimeter counter that we bought with the matte finish that we talked about. It’s by another quartz company called Compac in a concrete-like color called Ice-Zement. We tried to get a picture of some of the temporary water spots, but they were just too subtle to show up for the camera.
You can see the full kitchen reveal in this post if you’re looking for more info about our remodel, and as always if you like something in our house you can most likely find the source here.

Below is one of the best pictures I found that shows the bright white Corian counters in our second home’s kitchen (this photo is from before we fully finished – hence no crown molding yet). It was SUPER white (even brighter than our white cabinets).
Here’s where you can read more about getting them installed, which shows how that crazy machine they used blends the seam between two slabs to make it completely disappear.

And if you can forgive this terrible old photo that we snapped the day we moved out of our first house (it’s one of the few we have in high-resolution), you can see the granite we chose for our first kitchen remodel. And you can see it even closer up in this old post about how we got a blueberry stain out of the granite using bleach.

Although they’re not fully installed yet, you may have caught a sneak peek of our butcher block counters going in at the beach house last week (the perimeter cabinets are nearly done, but we still have to add a larger slab to the island with a hole for the sink and an overhang for the stools).

We’re Digging

The above shot is one of the two beds we propped up with these “uplifting” six inch risers (this room is still waiting on a headboard and curtains for the windows). They’re nice and sturdy, and now the beds are a better height for the side tables – plus we can squeeze some storage underneath if we ever need to.
Here are the 18″ bed skirts we picked up to cover them. They could use some ironing but we don’t have an iron at the beach house yet.
Here’s the trailer to The Five, the British drama/mystery that we recently watched on Netflix. Although I’d say it doesn’t do it much justice.

If you’re looking for something we’ve dug in a past episode, but don’t remember which show notes to click into, here’s a master list of everything we’ve been digging from all of our past episodes.

And lastly, a big thank you to CanvasPop for sponsoring this episode. Don’t forget to use the code YHL50 to get 50% off any CanvasPop order over $100, including canvasses, frames, photo magnets, and even pillows!