Mark Mitten  0:01  
No calls today, if you want some free genius saint from the world's greatest Kitchen Designer Paul McElroy, crapola, Fridays two to 4pm 610-500-4071.

Paul McAlary  0:17  
Hello, thank you for listening and welcome to calls with Paul. Today is going to be as sort of special. We're going to take a break from taking phone calls. And I'm going to talk a little bit about countertops and the different kinds of countertops and pricing of countertops. I guess, to start off talking about countertops, maybe we'll talk about the most popular types of countertops that existed. Before most of us were probably born, which is Formica that was certainly the most popular kind of countertop that was around when I grew up. It's really called laminate. Laminate Formica is the brand from mica, which is a kind of laminate. But lots of different companies make laminate from mica is just one of the most popular Wilsonart would be another brand, but from Microsoft from the past, which was so popular has been replaced by what we call now solid surface countertops. So solid surface countertops, it means that whatever that's on that surface of the countertop goes all the way through. So that could be a stone like granite or marble, or soapstone where the whole thickness of the one and a quarter inch thickness of the countertop continues straight through the product to something like Korean. That's a acrylic that whatever the color is on the surface of your Korean and the color goes all the way through to something like engineered stone which would be quartz, which is a man made product, but the color goes all the way through. There are new kinds of countertops that we'll talk about a little bit later that the color doesn't go all the way through. But they're not like from mica from mica was or laminate countertops or particle board that was laminated with a plastic a high strength plastic laminate that would go on to the surface of the countertops and it was probably the most popular kinds of countertops up until maybe even the 90s when you have a countertop that's constructed out of particleboard with a veneer of this surface on top. Then your sink has to be a top mounted sink so you cut a hole in the countertop and then the countertop is dropped in through that hole. All the solid surface countertops that are pretty much universal nowadays that people get at least our customers, all of those countertops or undermount sinks generally or farm sinks which also usually are under mounted. You can under mount the sinks because the cabinet the countertop is a solid surface all the way through and they're also all impervious to water, water damage, so you can mount the sink underneath and you don't have to worry about the sides of the product getting wet. Nowadays the only kind of countertop that if you're going to get it from mica or laminate countertop that will probably make sense would be if you had a galley kitchen. And the reason it might be something you might want to consider if you had a galley kitchen is not spending a lot of money and getting a solid surface countertop is that if you have a galley kitchen, nobody can probably if it's between two walls on each side of the room, no one will be able to see the edge of your countertop. If you got a color that was very and they make colors that are exact photographs of marbles and granites. They even make from micro or laminates that have little pits in them to really reproduce what granite and marble surfaces have. But if you haven't galley kitchen, which is two straight sets of countertops, and you can't see the edges, it's almost impossible for people to tell that they're laminate tops from being in showrooms in the past where we had a maybe a galley kitchen with a laminate countertop on the top. If it was a granite pattern or a marble pattern, people would put their customers who put their hands on the surface and say gee, I wish I could get a granite countertop like this. Not realizing they were actually handling from mica or laminate countertop. But once laminate became less popular, and once you turn a corner with a laminate countertop, you have to have seams and the seams are showing and it sort of identifies itself as a cheap countertop. And they're they're man made and nowadays the the fabrication process with these with mica countertops is so expensive that an inexpensive granite countertop usually ends up being almost the same price as a Formica countertop. So that's why we really They don't pretty much ever sell them anymore. So why don't we start talking about Granite next, which was the next kind of countertop quarry, and then granite that really big started to become popular. And that was maybe in the late 90s and early 2000s. Granite is a natural stone, it's very hard. It's almost impossible. I mean, you can scratch granite, but if you really would have to try and you'd have to take a metal high tension metal screw, maybe I once had a metal screw sticking out of the bottom of a toolbox. And I dragged the tool box, of course the granite countertop, and it still didn't scratch it, but I've seen it scratch a quartz countertop, which is just a tiny bit less hard than granite. But granite is a very difficult stone to scratch, very hard to chip, you don't have to worry about Granite losing its shine. A marble countertop does something called etching, where if you get anything acidic on it, it changes the surface properties of the marble and the shine is lost. So if you have a marble countertop with a shiny marble countertop, and you leave lemonade or iced tea on the surface of your countertop, you'll lose the shine without that puddle of liquid sack. So that's where we discourage people from getting marble countertops, but not with granite. Granite won't do that. The only thing people that are concerned about with granite is the fact that you are supposed to be sealing a granite countertop. Generally, you might be advised to seal it once every year if it's a particularly poor stop once every couple of years. Generally, you can also get sealers nowadays that come with 10 year warranties or longer and longer and longer warranties. But sealing a granite countertop is actually very simple. You can buy a quarter the stuff for $25. And you just wipe it on with a rag and you let it dry overnight and you're done. So it's not like it's a hardship ceiling, a granite countertop, we have a very expensive granite countertop in our kitchen. And we've only sealed it once in five years, we have no stains and never had a problem. Probably we should be sealing it more often. But we don't cook that often. So I wouldn't worry about it. But it's probably a process of sealing your granite top shouldn't take you more than 15 or 20 minutes really. And that's the reason a lot of times people don't get granite because they're concerned about having to do something. But really this maintenance involved with people's kitchens. So 15 minutes every couple of years shouldn't dissuade you from getting it if you really liked the pattern or the you really want the harder surface or you want the inexpensive price, because granite probably starts at maybe $43 a square foot right now. And the least expensive Korean colors, or the least expensive quartz colors that people might pick would probably be at least 50% more expensive. The next stone I'd like to talk about is quartzite. And that might be a little confusing to people because it sounds like quartz. Quartz is really engineered quartz, which is man made stone quartzite is a natural stone that has a lot of the properties of granite, it's very hard. If it's pure quartz site, it's not very porous. It doesn't etch like marble does, it looks probably more like marble, then certainly more like marble than any granite would. And it's as close as you're going to get with marble without actually having in a natural product without actually having it be real marble. And real marble we'll talk about in a minute but I would discourage customers from getting real normal unless they really wanted to stress countertop. So courtside is a stone maybe looks a lot like marble. The one thing that might be a little confusing too, is that the cost of quartzite to get these stones that have the properties of granite but look like marble, they end up costing as much as the quartz countertops do probably $85 a square foot right now is maybe the least expensive price for a quartzite countertop there'll be some quartz countertops that will be available for that price. There'll be some marble countertops that will be available for that price. But quartzite will be natural if you have a more traditional kitchen and not a contemporary kitchen. A natural stone top often looks. The more traditional Your kitchen is, the more a manmade product might look a little bit out of place. So you might want to consider quartzite some of the the manmade engineered stones are getting the Closer and closer to looking almost like real marble. So some of those might not look as out of place. But you know, still, when I look at them, I can tell they're a man made product. And it definitely, if you're looking for a traditional look, that some kind of natural stone is probably going to make you happier. Before we get to the quartz tops, maybe we'll discuss Serpentine, which is a very unusual kind of stone that has all kinds of wild patterns, all kinds of different beliefs, sometimes it can have bumps and veins and other things in it. It's generally unusual for people to use serpentine as a countertop nowadays, because it's has a lot of the properties of marble in that it's, it can chip, it can scratch an edge easily. But it's very distinctive and unusual looking. So if you're if you're really wanted an unusual looking countertop that you hadn't seen before, and you we're okay with it looking weathered and distressed, then quartzite might be something to consider, because it's it's definitely not something they used to see. And if you go to the granite yard, you can ask the granite people about it. But they'll usually have maybe a slab or two of serpentine in their showroom just for the the that unusual scenario that somebody really wants something unusual like this. The next top I'm going to talk about is engineered quartz. So engineered stone, there's a million different companies that make it the most popular ones that rattle off the top of my head may be Cambria as the most expensive. And one of the most popular Silestone, Caesarstone, avanza, zodiac, Han stone, there's via Terra, we carry MSI is one of the least expensive, at least for their bottom tier colors. But all of these different brands, Wilsonart, quartz, engineered quartz, all these different brands are all pretty much the same product. And there's not much difference, since it's a patented process, in how they're made in the durability of them is should all be the same if they all have the same amount of bonding resin in them. And that's what glues them together. Sometimes we worry about with some colors, particularly with MSI, that there could be an unusual amount of resin in some of their colors. And if that was the case, those colors would be a little bit more susceptible to damage by light. But that's over an extended period of time. But generally, almost all of these different companies, the difference in durability and quality, etc in the engineered stone is going to be insignificant. And the real differences is simply in the patterns, they all come up with their own patterns, they all come up with their own colors. Some do it better than others, Cambria has lighter colors that a lot of times people are looking for, because the quarry that they make their engineered stone from has a particularly bright white quartz. That's in Colorado, I believe. So they have some of the lighter marble ish looking colors, which make people interested in Cambria and make it a popular choice. And since it's in the United States company and manufactured in the United States completely and their quarry is in the United States, it does make it probably 20% More expensive than many of the other courts brands simply because it's all coming from the US and we're not importing anything when we're selling it. But that being said, the colors are probably the nicest colors that people like it does come with a lifetime warranty. So if you make or scratch it, they'll come out and repair it for nothing. However, you know, that repair job probably would have been $300. And so the 20% actually paid to get a Cambria countertop would have been many times the service call that you paid, but the colors are lovely. So that's really why people oftentimes pick it quartz the properties of quartz, it's very hard difficult to scratch not as hard as granite though because it's a quartz stone that's glued together with this resin. People get confused and think that you can put a hot pot on it, but that's not really the case. The glue the resin that's bonding the quartz tops is actually has a melting temperature of 442 degrees or something like that 444 You know, so that means anything more than 440 degrees Fahrenheit, which might be something coming out of your broiler or red hot pan coming off the stove with oil in it could be higher than that temperature. So were you to put those things right onto your quartz countertop. You could definitely singe the resin and you'd be able to tell so don't get in the habit of putting up a hot pot on it. On a quartz top, in fact, even a granite top is that you could pit granite if you hadn't sealed your granite in many years, which is a lot of people don't do. And then you wiped up your granite countertop and had water get into the pores of the granite. And then you put a hot steaming hot pot on top of your granite countertop, you could boil the water that was sort of in the pores of the granite, and that might make the pores like chip out if there was a little bit because the water is going to expand. If there was a little bit of water beneath the surface of the countertop, you could pick your granite. So generally the only kind of topic that really anybody should be putting a hot pot on

without any worry whatsoever is either soapstone which we'll get to in a few minutes. But you know soapstone because it's what's in the chemistry lab that you were in high school or college, they had for their countertops, so that the Bunsen burner wouldn't burn it or you couldn't do anything to it, or at least burning wise, or you could put hot things on some of the other porcelain countertops that are out or glass countertops that are out. But as far as engineered stone goes, the advantage of the engineered stone is that you don't have to seal it because it doesn't have any pores in the surface, the whole thing is a big vat of stone all bonded together with the resin. So you're not never going to have to seal it or do anything to it. And the only disadvantage of it, I would think would be you still can't put a hot pot on it. And you can't put use it outside. Because if it's really exposed to some harsh sunlight, the resin actually can make the countertop sort of fade, it can the resin can sort of change colors, you know, maybe get a little bit clouded. If it's really an extreme sunshine over a long period of time, we're talking about a decade, more than a decade, if you happen to have an incredibly light filled kitchen with sunlight striking the countertop for a majority of the day, it might be something that you want to think about if you thought you were going to be in your home for 20 years, 30 years, and you wanted your top for last that long. The next thing we'll talk about is what sometimes get advertised as green tops, these are tops that essentially are using usually the resin that they use to bond the courts with but maybe recycling glass, or I've seen them recycled dollar bills where they you know, the whole dollar bills are all chopped up or the money's chopped up, you get it from the government, it's all shredded. And then you just embed all this money in the in the resin that you bond the quartz countertops with, and now you have a solid surface countertop, that's going to not be you can't don't have to seal you don't have to do anything with. But these kinds of tops are sort of a gimmick. You know, a lot of times they're touted as being green. Because you're using recycled money in this case or recycled glass. I think if you really do a freakanomics type of review of how green they really are is they're not really much greener than any other kind of countertop that you might be getting it just sort of a little bit of a racket, it's all resin. If there's even if there's shredded money on the inside, what's the difference between that resin that's being used in the courts that's on the inside, and it's certainly more resin. So those kinds of tops are going to fade rapidly compared to a quartz top. You know, glass tops also can be considered a green kind of countertop. But they're very unusual because you can't really get glass to turn a corner or you know, cut it or work with it. We've never mainline kitchen design or any of the companies I've ever worked for. I've never sold a glass top yet to a customer, it would be outrageously expensive. And it would just be a very unusual situation where it would actually make sense. Concrete might be another kind of countertop a lot of people ask for in this area, there was one company that made concrete tops that was you know, a larger company. And you could go to their showroom and you could look at all the different kinds of concrete tops that they could make. And they can acid wash them and do all kinds of interesting things to them. But they went out of business because there wasn't much of a demand. And so the only people making concrete tops right now would be small contractors that are building a forms right on people's cabinets and maybe pouring the countertops themselves. And I would say that that's a bad idea. And it's a bad idea because your tarp that you're getting is going on top of the kitchen cabinets that you spent a fortune for and the contractor that's doing it because they're not really The as much of an expert as you might hope, because there's really not much of a demand for it. And if they've done a couple of a bunch of concrete countertops, they certainly probably haven't done a dozen, or I would doubt it. They're not advertising it. I've never seen anybody advertising doing it lately, besides the company that went out of business at least locally here, so unless you have a company that really advertises and has a showroom and does this professionally for a living, I would steer away from concrete tops. The next kind of countertop I was talking about is acrylics. Acrylics are Korean is the most popular name in acrylics Wilsonart makes acrylic countertops IMAX is a kind of acrylic countertop from mica has an acrylic countertop, there's lots of countertops, that there are different companies that make acrylic countertops, and they're solid, acrylic, they go all the way color goes all the way through, they're very soft. So there's good things about that. The fact that they're soft means that you can make a sink, that's integral, you can take an acrylic pour into an acrylic sink in the you know the state shape of a sink, and then you can melt it and sand it and make it part of your countertop so that there is no seam between your countertop and your sink. So that's one of the advantages of acrylics. The seams when you turn a corner in the countertops, you'll glue the acrylic with other acrylic liquid acrylic, and you'll glue the seams together and when you sand them smooth, you really won't be able to find the seam, or at least most customers would never be able to find the seam and in an acrylic count it's up unless they made the mistake of getting an acrylic countertop that had really big veins in it. And if you have one of these acrylic colors that has really large veins in it, you should only be getting that using that countertop on maybe an island or only on straight countertop runs. Because once you turn the corner, you're going to glue the acrylic together you're going to sanded smooth, but then the veins are going to suddenly be going in one direction and then change directions or look very unusual. won't look anywhere near as nice as when you have a granite or any kind of stone countertop and you're turning the corner because the veining on the granite or the natural stone tops actually goes through the stone and so the slab underneath the slab that's on top, if you're following me is almost the same pattern. So it makes it actually sort of much easier for people to match patterns will never be perfect, but it's easier to match. And in acrylics. It just looks strange when we know there's no visible seam but the pattern is suddenly changing in the middle of a countertop. The nice thing about acrylics too is where you to scratch your acrylic countertop you just sanded down and you'll get rid of the scratch in fact the material that they send Korean and these other acrylic countertops in the finishing process is the same green scrubby pad that's on the back of a sponge. So if you had a whole bunch of scratches on your very soft acrylic countertop and you wanted to get rid of them, you would go to the Lowe's or Home Depot and go to the paint department and you'll find their their sandpaper that's actually green, a big big sheet of green scrubby pad. And then if you get a palm sander, a little hand sanding machine, you can go through and sand all of your countertops to their brand new finish in probably a half an hour. You just take this palm sander and you just run it over your whole countertop and bring it back to New. If you have a little tiny scratch on your countertop, you just grab your sponge, and then you have to sit there with a little elbow grease and rub back and forth for a minute or two to get rid of the scratch. But they're renewable. So it's the acrylic tops or renewable surfaces. If you got a sink people tell me have told me I got like the Korean sinks. I had a white Corian sink and I got a stain on it and I couldn't get it out. Well you couldn't get it out because you were doing trying to get it out the wrong way. You're probably trying to get it out with a cleaner. What you could have done is just sand your sink because it's not porous to stain is sort of just stuck on the surface of the sink. And you just get your palm sander out and get a little elbow grease and get your scrubby pad and you can sand through the surface of the Korean and now you have a brand new Korean sink. So that's one of the advantages of the acrylic tops. But I guess you've forgotten some of the periphery kind of countertops like what about a wood countertop. Solid wood countertops are usually either a solid piece of countertop and like a log that somebody went out. Maybe you made your island that have this big huge wall Why'd giant log of walnut or whatever kind of wood it was, and you went to the fabricator and they made a top out of just one piece of wood, or more likely they make it out of a, they'll make it out of a bunch of pieces of butcher block. And that way you wouldn't have to worry about warping or anything else are all those things would be less likely. Those would be pieces of wood that would all be glued together. And then there's many different kinds of wood that can be used for countertops. Oak is a very inexpensive hardwood. That is would be the least expensive maples, a harder wood a little bit more expensive. Walmart is a popular kind of wood that people use for tops that would be one of the most expensive kinds of wood it's also has the most variation and difference in coloration than any other kind of wood. So if you're going to get a walnut countertop you should be prepared for your countertop, you know having all kinds of wild differences in it and knots essentially or you know patterns of knots in the surface of the wood. But butcherblock tops, the nice thing is if you caught on it, you're going to destroy it or you're going to get scratches on it from the knife etcetera. So you have to decide if you want to do that and make it a Warren countertop. Most people don't they just like the wood. So the they still have a cutting board on their wooden countertops but your sink if you're getting a wood countertop, and you made it an undermount sink in the middle of your countertop, then you really really have wood exposed to water around your sink area all the time. And so you'd really want that top to be heavily sealed. You know most of the countertops that people get are sealed with tung oil or some other kind of soil that wouldn't really lend itself for a real long durability around your sink area. So I would recommend people getting a top butcher block or wooden top on their island if they didn't have a sink in it and if they had a sink in their island, that sink is probably not going to get used in anywhere near the amount of it's not going to be used for clean up really. You know that the cleanup sink would be used for so you have more longevity. Stainless steel is a kind of countertop that was made and popular, inexpensive homes, maybe 1920s was the most time it was the most popular. I don't really know of a company locally. That makes stainless steel tops I'm sure I could Google it and find somebody because it's not incredibly difficult but it's an unusual surface, it would scratch easily. If you scratch the stainless steel top then you'd have the issue of trying to get the scratch out for to brushed finish that scratch might not be that obvious. It would certainly be interesting looking if you're going for an industrial look in a very contemporary kitchen, a stainless steel countertop or glass copper, something unusual kind of top might be an interesting look. But our mainland kitchen design, Sterling kitchens the place I worked at 15 years ago. It's a huge company. I don't know that any of the designers there either had ever used that a stainless steel top done, I guess the one kind of stone that I've left off our list is soapstone is a natural stone that I mentioned earlier. That's a kind of stone that you've been familiar with from chemistry lab from high school or college. The least expensive stones are sort of a solid lack. That's probably what you had if when you were in school that you were used to seeing the most expensive soak stones have really beautiful veining. Often the veins are even green and the soapstone itself is not black and gray ish, but it has a little green tinge to it. The thing about soapstone is the surface of it sort of dries out over time so over a three week or four week period of time, your very dark and luxurious looking soapstone top will get a tinge of gray over the surface of it. If you just take a rag and you oil it with mineral oil, there's some kind of chemical reaction that occurs with the surface of the stone. That brings it back to brand new. In fact, soapstone is also very soft. And if you drag anything across the surface of your countertop or you were to cut on your top, you will you know scratch the top and that will scratch will look gray as well. But once again, once you've scratched it all up, you just get out your rag and mineral oil and then when you reapply that then the surface that's exposed whether it has scratches in it or not will all become uniform and in the dark, original color. So the scratches sort of just sort of almost essentially go away as far as being a scratches concern. earned. You know I guess over time, if you really had scratches and chips and things like that in your top because you were really abusing it, your top would become bumpy but the color would would remain uniform and substances are pretty popular top nowadays because what first off you can't even can burn it. And it's the only top that you can put a hot pot on. And it's this dark black color and it goes goes well with a lot of the white cabinets that people are ordering nowadays, as well as a lot of other colors too. So soapstone is an interesting kind of stone and when you're picking a stone like soapstone, since it's it's not as popular as some of these other stones. You probably want to go to a few different granite yours to see different samples of soapstone, or different stone you wants to see different samples of soapstone to pick out a color that you really like. And I think the only topic that I haven't really discussed is a topic that I would discourage anybody from doing. It was very popular because it was a whole a do it yourself project that was popular and maybe the 2000s or before even, you know sometimes even in the 60s, but a tiled countertop. So if you really wanted to, if you were doing yourself there and you wanted to save money on a countertop, and you wanted something that was you didn't have to worry that it was not going to be ruined by water, but you couldn't afford a granite countertop or a quartz countertop or any of these other kinds of countertops, you can make your countertop with tile and you would just use cement board as your substrate. And then you would cement tile to the cement board and to the fake front edge. Sometimes people would tile the countertop and put a wood edge on the front. You could also have instead of a wood edge, you could have a tile edge. If you did a wood edge, you would have the top the cement board and the lower level plywood that you would be screwing the with tiny screws and gluing the wood edge too. But the thing about a tile countertop is they're really outdated nowadays. And no it's a bumpy surface so you can't write on your countertop. I mean, I'm sitting here while we're talking at my kitchen countertop, which is lovely. And I can be writing notes to myself while I'm talking on my kitchen countertop you could be writing a lot grocery list, if you have a towel countertop, you have all these grout lines and seams and everything else that are getting in your way. And even if you're making the countertop,

I would say Your time has some value. And it's got to take you know, between making the top and grouting up and gluing the the tiles and the materials and everything I would be I would think you would probably if you paid yourself $20 an hour for your time, you would be at the same price as a granite countertop for $43 a square foot so you wouldn't really be saving yourself any money if he gave any value to your work effort. So I would discourage anybody from getting an outdated style of pop. Nowadays, when there's such inexpensive granite out there. A smallish average sized kitchen is maybe 50 square feet of countertop. This granite countertops and granite companies have specials all the time for the sink, and the top and everything and installation and templating and everything included for under two and a half $1,000. So 2020 $200 which nowadays with the amount of money that you're spending on your kitchen, it's not an extended exceedingly large amount of money. So anyway, that's my our discussion this week on countertops. Occasionally I'll be taking a break in the future, we're going to go to taking calls every other week, starting I think in the middle of April, give me some free up some of my time. And then occasionally I'll also since we're only taking calls once every two weeks, I'll be able to throw in a podcast like this on a particular topic, or have a special guest on or make the podcasts a little bit more interesting and more informative, instead of the same instead of the same thing, which we'll be doing every other week essentially. So thanks for listening. Goodbye from from Paul maxillary with calls for Paul. Bye bye.

Mark Mitten  34:29  
Thank you for listening to the mainline kitchen design podcast with nationally claimed Kitchen Designer Paul maxillary. This podcast is brought to you by Brighton cabinetry, high quality custom cabinetry at competitive prices. For more on kitchen cabinets and kitchen design, go to www dot mainline kitchen design.com

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