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.

Let’s face it, guys are the hardest to buy Christmas gifts for! It’s a challenge to say the least. With my newfound love (more like an obsession) for Etsy, I’m hoping for a much easier time this year when it comes to buying gifts for the special men in my life. With SO many unique sellers and handmade items, this one site opens a whole new realm of possibilities. Here are a few of my favorite recent finds that would be perfect for those hard to buy for lads:

This is, hands down, my favorite “gift for him” this year… I adore this Smokey Guitar Strap from Moxie & Oliver. Made to order, have it customized with your favorite song lyrics, quote or special message. This is a perfect and meaningful gift for your special guitar player and bound to be a favorite on Christmas morning.

Perfect for your snack-food loving guy, this Gourmet Popcorn Seasoning Kit from Jackie & Ario is bound to be a home run. The set comes with 10 gourmet popcorn seasons in small glass topped tins and popcorn — of course! Experiment with flavors such as chocolate caramel, dill pickle, parmesan garlic, barbecue and more.

Here’s a gift idea for the “techy” guys. This Apple iPod Hard Drive Clock from Teco Art was created from an actual circuit board. A great conversation piece for any geek-centric office space.

7th House on the Left does not accept payment or perks for anything in our Etsy Thursday features. We simply have an obsession with Etsy that we want to share with everyone : )

Today’s post is coming to you from my handy dandy iPhone. Photos, typing, links and all. Why? Well, we don’t have internet quite yet. Our cable guy came on Monday to set everything up but didn’t have a our Tivo cable cards listed on his service slip. Therefore, he didn’t have the cards with him which consequently moved out cable/phone/internet hook up to a later day. But no worries! Our handy dandy iPhones (and the WordPress app) save the day.

Sunday night, we made the big move from my parent’s guest room to our new (to us) house! With countless trips back and forth between their house, our house and the storage unit… we were quite tired. But the adrenaline was keeping us going. Bentley on the other hand, had no earthly idea what was going on. Nevertheless, he found a cozy spot on the dash of the Yukon (which we borrowed from my parent’s to haul our stuff) to hide out and keep an eye on everything:

By 11:00 that night, we were unloaded and ready to start living in our new abode. Well, sort of ready. We needed to unpack all of the tons and tons of boxes first to start officially living.

We decided to make the guest room our “moving headquarters”. We put aaaaall of the boxes in that room. We did this because we are pretty sure we will be unpacking boxes for the next few days — if not weeks. Whenever we get to a stopping point for the day, we want to be able to shut the door and not have to look at the craziness.

We failed to take a photo of what it looked like when it was full to the max (yeah, I know, what kind of bloggers are we?!), but here is what the scene is looking like now, three days later:

Needless to say, we still have a ways to go. I promise it’s organized … organized chaos.

While we’ve been busy bees unpacking, we’ve come across stuff that doesn’t really fit in our home’s “design plan”. I mean, come on, it’s been sitting in storage for 8 months. That’s plenty of time for someone’s style to change. And that is has. Not much though. Though we still have a great love for contemporary and modern design, we’re leaning a little more towards rustic revival meets vintage modern these days — with a touch of traditional (we even took a design quiz to help us figure that one out, remember? Check out our his & hers quiz results here). Kind of like… if Martha Stewart and Jonathan Adler had a baby. But that’s another post entirely. Obviously.

So as we’ve been unpacking, we’re making a pile for a yard driveway sale. Seeing as how Christmas is fast approaching, we will be holding off on that until after the first of the year. Not to mention it is absolutely freeeeeeezing outside. In the mean time, we are going to store the loot in our attached (soon to be climate controlled — hopefully) storage shed outside.

The Christmas tree is up but yet to be fluffed and decorated. I absolutely cannot wait to get my hands on that thing and Christmas-fy our new nest. Ordinarily, we are totally decorated for Christmas by Thanksgiving day. Yes, we are those types of people. But this year, we’ve obviously had a lot on our plate