Tuesday in my Sort-of-a-Kitchen

The big news was that our granite counter tops for the kitchen re-do arrived:

Mu Shu was intrigued with the stuffed animal (a seal? an otter?) wedged into the granite truck's bumper:

Do they do this in other parts of the country? Or is this only an L.A. thing, to lash an unsuspecting stuffed animal onto a truck?

Anyway, I was far more intrigued with the oodles of tubes:

Takes a lot of epoxies and glues to be a granite installer!:

The granite men set up shop in my driveway and, after some careful measuring, cut out the holes for all the various switch plates:

And then the exciting part--the granite started coming in! Here's half a sink:

He's cutting out the plywood sub-counter (is that a word?) where the sink will go:

A piece of counter, temporarily resting on pieces that will eventually be our island, gives me a rough idea of what the island will look like:

The sink is dropped into place:

Oh, man, I love me this sink. Deeper and wider and altogether sexier than the old one.

Surprise, surprise; the cabinets in my 80-year-old house aren't totally plumb. This requires some fancy footwork to mash down the granite pieces so they lie totally flat:

I love how they custom-mix the colored goo that fills the gap between two pieces of granite. It is sparkly, just like the stone:

A fair amount of shoving and measuring and sanding and buffing went on in this corner, where the levels of stone were off at first:

This is the Big Kahuna--a nine-foot-long piece of granite, together with its "edges," weighing in at about 400 pounds:

It gets dropped into place verrrrry carefully:

And then immediately pulled back up.

Then they stick some shims (thin pieces of wood) here and there to ensure a totally level surface, and apply gobs of go:

The guys told me that when it dries, it's harder than the granite:

They had to wrassle that thing in there:

At the end of the day, all cleaned of sawdust and stone dust, the counters look beautiful:

I can't wait to show you the rest of the kitchen! Tomorrow, I'm told, is tiling-the-backsplashes day. Yay!