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Laminate with hardwood edging is a cheap but nice looking option. I was impressed with the variety of pattern options when I built my bathroom counter.
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I DIY'd a solid surface countertop and it wasnt too bad
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Concrete. Fairly simple to DIY, can be dyed, and smoothed to almost a gloss finish.
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(08-04-2016, 02:50 PM)BillN Wrote: Laminate with hardwood edging is a cheap but nice looking option.
This is what I would do in your situation.
Put your wood edging on first then laminate over it then router a chamfer on the edge..
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apparently Home Depot has some Chinese origin stone that is fairly reasonable.
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Stone as in tile, slab, random sizes?
Rocket Science is more fun when you actually have rockets.
"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government." -- Patrick Henry
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(08-04-2016, 10:11 PM)K. L McReynolds Wrote: Concrete. Fairly simple to DIY, can be dyed, and smoothed to almost a gloss finish.
Having tried concrete, it's harder than you think. It's best done in a mold, outside, for various reason but then you face the problem of getting it inside (it's very heavy). There is also an art to coloring concrete and getting a color match when you mix multiple batches.
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I thought about concrete, but I have prior experience and I'm not up to that. Still trying to decide. Getting the walls done has taken longer than I thought
I haven't figured out if the Chinese stone is really stone or some mashed up radioactive material (I kid, I think). Not really interested in having installers do it for various reasons.
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There's an Ikea in south philly, they have some nice resonable counter tops.
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I thought about Ikea, but we are an all-Prius family and that's 3+ hours through traffic populated my an amazing number of horrible people
