~$400 including expedited shipping. My GC just had his regular countertop guy do them, which wasn't great.... he had trouble making clean cuts. If I were going to do it again I would have pressed for someone with expertise to cut them. You can see in the image that the facing is not made of the stone peak, because too much was broken during the cutting to make the mitered edge. I'm a little bummed, but mostly pleased with the surface (which is the important part) thus far.

Thanks for the replies! My wife suggested we talk to a local real estate agent, so i think that is a good idea... just that Im not sure how helpful they are likely to be if we arent selling yet :) As for saving for our dream house, I dont disagree, however if doing this up nicely over the next ~5 years or so while we live here nets us some extra in the eventual sale, then that of course will help us as well. Interesting thing happened today actually. I got a knock on the door and one of the older neighbours asked if he could take some lemons from the tree. I of course said yes. Anyway he was telling me he had lived in the street for 40 years. I asked him if the house had always looked like this, and he said no that ~30 years ago the old old owner did a massive renovation and pulled off the timber and put up the bricks and gutted the inside of the house. Interesting stuff!

Having been brought up in a Lockwood home I can appreciate your love of the wood. I notice you have a light green bench and that would blend nicely with some similar colours in the room. I would consider having your cupboard doors replaced or sprayed to compliment the bench or visa versa you can have your bench updated with a new finish to modernise it. Perhaps you could just price out the cost of a new bench and leave the rest of the kitchen as it is. The odd bit around the dishwasher looks weird and that might be able to be fixed by curving a new bench into a small breakfast bar type set up. If there is room I would also reposition the microwave to the right of the cook top and use the existing space for a display or a lovely pot plant.

Laughter is the best medicine. A person who laughs suffers from less anxiety and feels better all-round. Although scientists still don’t know exactly why we laugh, there’s lots of evidence that it has a beneficial effect. To take just one example: children who laugh a lot develop faster and better than their peers. We move 18 different muscles when we laugh. And while we’re laughing, our diaphragm massages our abdominal organs and supplies fresh oxygen to the brain. Applying this principle to interior design, we can say that décor that makes us smile also keeps us healthy. Here are a few amusing ideas that will bring more humour and individuality to your home. For men with a sense of fun Did you know that men with a sense of humour are more attractive to women? Studies by psychologists have found that women looking for a potential partner prefer men with a sense of humour because it is an indication of an active and healthy brain. Strangely enough, the opposite is not true: men don’t prefer witty women as partners. For a man, it seems to be more important that a woman can laugh at his jokes. In light of this, men (and especially those still looking for an ideal partner) would be well advised to furnish their homes with a few humorous extras. Why not opt for a white shark that leaps out of the living room wall, or a fitted sheet that turns the bed into a building site? Funny sayings as wall tattoos can also make women laugh. Why not give it a try! It’s important, of course, that you also think the decorations are funny. In fact, this is one of the few rules governing humorous home furnishings: it needs to be something you can laugh about as well. The unexpected What makes us laugh? On most occasions it’s something unusual or even impossible that tickles our funny bone. Most jokes are constructed to do exactly this, making a punchline out of something we didn’t anticipate. There might also be a touch of „schadenfreude“. Similarly, humorous interior accessories also aim to be something out of the ordinary: the lasso, for example, that appears to defy gravity by holding a wine bottle, or the table that only has two legs. The soap dispenser in the form of a giant nose is also something completely unexpected, just like the emergency release panel that contains an emergency bar of chocolate instead of a lever. Childhood memories These things don’t always need to elicit gales of laughter: just a smile is often enough to keep us feeling more cheerful. The trigger could be objects that remind us of pleasant things from our past – such as the light that resembles the Tetris game we used to play as teenagers, or the smiley floor lamp, or the giant yo-yo from the ’80s. Simply funny! Laughter researchers claim that we model our sense of humour on that of our parents. Depending on how its parents react, even a six-month old baby knows what’s funny and what is not. And this is probably also the reason why the Japanese, for example, laugh about different things than Europeans. Within a certain cultural group, however, most people tend to find the same type of things funny. When furnishing your house or flat with amusing accessories, then, you can’t really go far wrong. So let’s start bringing a little humour into our homes! Source: Humorous Home Décor | HARO Flooring New Zealand