More kitchen Inspiration

Since picking out our tiles we've been focusing in a bit more on what the kitchen will hopefully look like. This picture is one of our favorites so far. We really love the light fixture. We're leaning towards something with a drum shade to tie it together with the dining room.

http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs36/f/2008/262/b/a/White_Kitchen_by_kehaola.jpg

New favourite tile store!

In our quest for cheaper tile options, today we found a really great resource in our neck of the woods. The Tile Store is at 20 Bermondsey Rd (conveniently close to a Peak Freans outlet store ;oD). Their selection is pretty good and their prices are decently low. The service was also really good. When we told them what we were looking for they showed us a few options including a few where the price had some "wiggle room". It definitely saved us alot of time digging through piles of tile.

Here are the tiles we picked up:

3x6 polished carrera backsplash.

12x24 ivory travertine floor tile. We weren't aiming for stone on the floor, but this stuff was significantly cheaper than alot of the porcelain options we were looking at.

First piece of kitchen

Since we have to wait to start the kitchen until some craziness at our respective jobs clears up we've been working on getting the pieces ready so we can avoid those long drives around town in the middle of working on the kitchen.

The first piece of our new kitchen arrived today. It is our kitchen sink that we ordered off E-bay.


Now we have nothing but the kitchen sink... lets hope things reverse in the next couple of weeks :oD

Dirty business!

After a couple of months living with our toilet choices we figured it is time to weigh in on their performance.

Basement bathroom: American Standard Cadet 3

Spec:
- ~$180
- Round bowl
- 2 piece
- map score: 1000
Overall we're pretty happy with this toilet. It's flushing power is really awesome. It also has a high water spot. The water spot was a big deal for me. In our last place we had one toilet with a high water spot and one with a low water spot, and the one was filthy a lot of the time. Given that this toilet was in our basement bathroom, it's size and price were also big selling factors. The main downside of this toilet is that it's bowl is a quite small. Larger people may not be so comfortable on this toilet.

Upstairs bathroom: Kohler Archer

Spec:
- ~$350
- Elongated bowl
- Comfort height
- 2 piece
- map score: 800

This toilet came to us by chance. We were planning on getting the Cadet 3 in it's 1 piece version for upstairs, but saw that the Kohler was a similar price and it matches our vanity. Surprisingly this toilet extends the same distance from the wall as the smaller Cadet 3 (this was a big surprise!). It's basic performance is good. The map score so far has been adequate and it also has a nice high water spot. The comfort height is not so comfy for shorter people, but overall it's not a huge down fall. The main point I'd fault this toilet on is the design of the mechanism inside the tank. The chain attached to the flusher lever wraps around the lever very easily. This results in the toilet filling and filling and filling until the problem is rectified. We had a bad situation where this occured before bed and the thing wasted water all night long (all the cold water pipes in our house were dripping with condensation :oS). A quick fix with a paper clip fixed the issue, but to have to "doctor" a toilet in this price range is kind of pathetic :oP