They're HERE!!

COUNTERS!!! 

Beautiful, incredible, glorious COUNTERS!!

Oh my. Oh lovely. You really can't understand what it's like to be without counters until you ARE without counters for almost a month. Nowhere to PUT STUFF, man. You gotta have someplace to put stuff. And now I do. 

We ended up going with bluestone-- locally sourced and milled-- and I couldn't be happier with the decision. It fits, y'know? It jives. Though it looks practically black in these photos, in real life it's pretty close to the floor color-- sort of a deep moody blue-gray. 
The hardware has also been put into place-- and lemme tell you, it's amazing what a difference that makes. Funny. We ended up going with these bin pulls and these simple handles, from Amazon. They are solid brass, and, at $2.95 each, I thought that was a terrific deal. (Restoration Hardware versions run $14 each.) But while the pulls and handles were terrific, hefty and polished and nice, the screws kept snapping, snapping, snapping. So we ended up swapping most of them for solid brass screws... caveat emptor, as they say. 

Whew. We are down to the very last things here, people! Obviously tiling the whole wall above the sink with subway tile will be a big job-- and that tile is going to continue along the little half-wall behind the stove, which you can see here:

...to make a backsplash. Then the wall above the sink is going to get chunky walnut-stained open shelving. I need to paint the toe kicks. I need to cut and nail our baseboards and our door frame back into place, and caulk and paint. There are two lights above the peninsula we haven't installed yet. And, of course we need to put our appliances in place and finally put our house back together. WOO! We're that close. Still really far away, but the daunting stuff is behind us. 
Now, ahem, if you'll excuse me, I have a big whopping party to host in 28 hours. And some cleaning must be done.
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