We’re back with an update on the big hall bathroom renovation (do you remember what it looked like before?). This past week the toilet, vanity hardware, counter top and sinks were all installed! Cue Hallelujah Chorus!

We talked a little bit last week about how we picked out our new toilets. Overall, the decision was pretty easy. And we love how they look in the bathrooms. However, when it came to deciding on the counter top for the hall bathroom, the decision unfortunately wasn’t so easy.

There are SO many options when it comes to counter top material these days. Granite, Avonite, Corian, Silestone, soapstone, glass, quartz, marble — just to name a few. And all of those materials have their own wide array of styles, finishes and colors. You also have to take into account each material’s maintenance procedures and durability. Needless to say, it was kind of overwhelming.

After much deliberation, hours of research and lots of samples, we finally decided to use quatrz. Silestone, specifically. Though the price tag for Silestone is a bit steeper than glass or some types of granite, we couldn’t find anything in granite or glass that tickled our fancy as much as Silestone’s Yukon. We also felt it would be a wise investment in the long run. After all, kitchens and bathrooms are really what sell a house, and quartz is a great balance between low maintenance and great looks.

We were also able to score a major deal. We began our price search at one of our favorite nationwide chains. They quoted us $1,800 for the single counter top, including a $600 charge to cut the holes for the sinks and mount them! That was more than we wanted to spend, so we decided to shop around some more. A few days later, a friend of my dad’s referred us to a good “counter top guy”. Eager and excited to find what we were looking for (at a comfortable price) we gave him a call. He ended up quoting us $1,700 (including cutting and mounting both sinks). You might be thinking, “That’s only a hundred bucks difference!” But he included a little something extra: a matching counter top for the master bathroom. As if that wasn’t awesome enough, he said our counter top for the hall bathroom would be ready only one week after they came to measure. A week! That’s less than half the amount of time the “other guys” told us. Score! (We’re still working on getting the vanity for the master bathroom in place, but they’ll be out to measure for that as soon as we’re done!)

A week later, as promised, two guys came to install the countertop. While they were doing their thing, we were in the other room, biting our nails and hoping it would look as good as we imagined it would. After weeks of imagining what it would look like, we hoped we made the right decision.

Once the installers were finished, we tiptoed down the hallway to check out their handy work, and luckily… we loved it!

The Silestone has more of a stone look and feel to it than we thought it would, and we are loving it! It’s kind of like a combination of marble and poured concrete, if that makes sense.

Oh!  Before we close this entry out, we can’t forget our vanity hardware! We found these little puppies at Home Depot (on sale!). We wanted hardware that wasn’t too modern, but not too traditional. We decided to keep it simple and sleek:

Now that all of these installations are complete, it’s time to install the faucets. We’ll be very happy when we can wash our hands and brush our teeth at a sink, rather than in the shower!

For more about the hall bathroom renovation, check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.