Installing our Black Walnut Craft Art Countertops.

And now I am going to rewind about twelve man hours to fill you in on how we got to this point.  Craft Art's homeowner DIY countertops come in a lot of sizes and lengths, but we still needed to cut each one down to size upon receiving them--this is part of the reason they are called "homeowner DIY countertops," you might need to cut and there will definitely be sanding and sealing involved.  But it is an amazing and affordable way (about half the cost of a finished piece!) to have an extremely high-quality product (solid, real heavy, beautifully grained wood) in your home for a little bit of labor. Worth it. I digress.

Before taking each board to the skill saw, we measured each space three times--double-checking each other's measurements--so six times?  We wanted to be sure-sure.  We took a picture of every countertop space and recorded the measurements right on the picture using the My Measures app--genius.

When it came time to actually cut the countertops (bottom side up), we used a long scrap piece of wood clamped to the countertops, with rags in between protecting the walnut, to serve as a guide. After a test cut, we determined there was an inch-and-a-half gap between the edge of the tool and the blade (I am so bad at these tool technical terms), so we added that onto every cut.

If you followed along on Instagram this weekend, you saw a lot of kitchen action (a. lot!) including sealing the underside of the wood.  We'll talk more about that later in the week when we seal the tops (we already have one coat on), but let's skip over all that sanding and sealing right now and jump right into tearing out the old countertops which happened Saturday morning--relatively easily.

There was a little prep after we ripped those suckers out, but it mostly involved vacuuming up spider webs (I can't even...), dust and removing wads of old paper towel??? Oh, and the prep to actually install the new countertops included pre-drilling holes to screw the countertops into and also these bigger holes seen below over our two corner cabinets (that have full covers over them) "so that the countertops can breathe."  (By the way, the countertops came with a video and instructions telling us exactly what to do--I read them aloud repeatedly all weekend. ;)

And then piece by piece, we installed the new countertops laying them all in place before screwing them down to make sure we didn't royally botch something up while cutting.  Whew, we didn't.

At this point, we patted ourselves on the back for a long time, walked through the new-larger space between the peninsula and the dining room table a dozen times--grinning like idiots, and then got back to work sanding to prep for sealing the tops.  Part of this sanding also included taking the squared edges to slightly rounded ones.

....Like I could leave you without a teaser.

Psst. We partnered with Craft Art for this project. All words, opinions and sweat are ours, all ours!