Winnow shopping

We've sporadically looked at various products over the past few months (even years), but have spent quality time for the past several weekends looking at lights and other things (plumbing fixtures, cabinet styles, granite, etc.) to try to narrow our choices down. Here are some of the things we liked.

We have potentially selected under-cabinet lighting for the kitchen that we saw at Lighting, Inc. We both liked the true-color rendering of the fluorescent fixture (Priori T2), which has a CRI of 90. Plus, it costs a lot less than the LED fixtures (whose color we don't like as well—though they are getting better). It's not dimmable, but we're not sure we need dimmable under-cabinet lighting.

Visiting Ferguson right across the street - oh, good Lord. Plumbing fixture overload. We did find a very interesting sink by Kohler (recently introduced) that we are considering for our master bath.

We ignored most of the kitchen portion of Ferguson as we have decided all of the appliances already (we're reusing everything we bought in 2008 pre- and post-Ike). But, they did have the prettiest pendant lighting over a bar there, almost exactly what I've been searching for. Now to see if I can squeeze a couple of those into the budget and hang them over our breakfast table!


Heading west to Re-Bath, we evaluated the color samples of all of the Onyx Collection colors in relation to some granite we'd like to use in our master bath. Actually, we have had to do this twice, since the granite we selected over a decade ago is no longer imported into the US (if we lived in Germany or the UK, we could get it!). The old granite was Blanco (Bianco) Iberico, from Spain. The new granite selection is Misty Pearl (origin unknown). It's as close as we could get, but definitely a different look.

Onyx Collection will be used for our tub surround (and caddies) in the hall bath and the entire shower (base, walls, shampoo caddies, etc.) in our master bath (we detest grout with a passion). We toured Onyx's manufacturing plant in 2008 , courtesy of our Onyx contact, Jim J., when we were in Kansas for a niece's wedding. Onyx Collection is an American-made solid-surface product similar to Corian, and to say that they have excellent customer service would be a gross understatement.

The Great Indoors has a rather impressive appliances section, including the Electrolux wall oven with its awesome racks that run on ball-bearings (this is one of my extravagances in the remodel).


We also looked at washers/dryers (ours are 16 yrs old, bought when we bought the house), and more plumbing fixtures-we like one of the Kohler sinks for the kitchen. And we're still pretty settled on a GROHE faucet for the kitchen sink.

We even looked at some flooring. Actually, rather a lot of flooring. And we have a lot more looking to do. Since we were in the area last weekend, we stopped by Arizona Tile on the Beltway near I-10 West, where we found a flooring tile that we might use in both the master bathroom and the pool area. Or might not. We looked at a lot of flooring on this side of town on Tuesday and brought home several other contenders (pictures not available yet!)