Kathleen Heaney: Hello, and welcome to Kathleen Can Do It. The DIY podcast, celebrating the fun and fails of doing it yourself. I'm Kathleen Heaney.

Kathleen Martin: I'm Kathleen Martin. We're just two Kathleens exploring the world of laminate countertops.

Kathleen Heaney: In this episode, we are discussing how your grandma's laminate countertops are not the laminate countertops of 2023.

Kathleen Martin: Many improvements have been made to this sort of looked down upon countertop.

Kathleen Heaney: I myself, in the past have poo-pooed laminate countertops because I thought them to be ugly. I am eating my words, because there are a lot of really cool sustainable companies out there that are making countertops from recycled materials. Printing on laminate has gotten so much better that at a quick glance, you can't even tell that it's not real marble, it's not real granite, et cetera.

Kathleen Martin: When I think about laminate or Formica, which is a main brand, so those words are kind of interchangeable. It's like when people say Kleenex versus tissue.

Kathleen Heaney: Or Q-tips versus ear cotton. I don't know.

Kathleen Martin: Ear cotton sticks.

Kathleen Heaney: Formica was the company that invented the laminate countertop, but Formica is just regular laminate countertops.

Kathleen Martin: When I think of laminate countertops, I think of something yellow. A yellow laminate. I think of a harsh squared off edge with a brown edging to it.

Kathleen Heaney: Like food would get caught in the seams of laminate countertops and sometimes, especially on the corners, little pieces would break off and it would be kind of crusty.

Kathleen Martin: And sharp. You would hit the corner and it would hurt, but not anymore. The reason we are talking about this is because we're looking for the best budget friendly options when you want to do that band-aid renovation in your home, or it can be a forever choice, depending on where you are in your renovation journey. For me, I have done epoxy counters in my kitchen, and we're going to do an episode on it because I think it's worth talking about.

Kathleen Heaney: Everywhere I turn, Pinterest, Instagram, everybody's covering their countertops with epoxy. It's frigging everywhere.

Kathleen Martin: Everywhere. Looking at these options, I wish we just chose a laminate instead.

Kathleen Heaney: Wow. Really?

Kathleen Martin: It has the perfect print of a granite or a marble. You're not trying to hand paint it yourself. That wasn't the hard part for me, the look. The hard part of epoxy is getting that perfect surface. With laminate, it's already done for you. Let's start out, what is laminate?

Kathleen Heaney: Laminate is a material that's made from layers of paper that are tightly pressed together to form a thin, rigid sheet that is fairly easy to work with. Then the sheet is glued to a wood substrate, typically for countertops like a composite wood, and so it's very low maintenance. The part with the design on it is layers of paper tightly pressed together. That's why modern laminate websites will call their product high pressure laminate or they have that other thing that I had seen, a thermal laminate. What's that?

Kathleen Martin: Thermal laminate is a little bit cheaper to make, so it's a little bit cheaper to buy. It's less customizable.

Kathleen Heaney: Probably for commercial settings and doctor's offices and stuff. It's my understanding that laminate is pretty easy to install.

Kathleen Martin: Just think about it. Weight alone, a marble or stone countertop is going to be so heavy, harder to transport. Whereas a laminate counter, depending on the size, could likely be installed by one person. Also, I was looking at the pricing and it always says price to install is between 25 to $40 a square foot or so.

Kathleen Heaney: That's not bad when you think about how much it costs to install actual stone or quartz. It is very affordable, and now you can make it look so high-end.

Kathleen Martin: I actually have a chart. Quartz is 50 to $90 a square foot. Granite is 40 to 100, solid surface.

Kathleen Heaney: Yes. I have solid surface in my apartment.

Kathleen Martin: Oh, okay.

Kathleen Heaney: I didn't know what it was. I literally had never heard of it until I moved into my apartment. I actually like solid surface, it's in all of my bathrooms. We'll get to that in another episode, but I bet that's more than laminate.

Kathleen Martin: Yeah, 37 to 67 and then says laminate. Yeah, 27 to actually 34. It says average is $29 a square foot.

Kathleen Heaney: I'm down with the laminate because there are so many cool prints. You don't even have to get marble lookalikes, all sorts of companies. In our research we found that the three biggest companies that people look for in terms of updated modern laminate is the company Formica, another company called Wilsonart, which I am really interested in. Because their website has a bunch of stuff about how they're the laminate company that uses the most recycled materials in their laminate countertops. Then there's another company called Arborite that people really like for modern looking laminate.

Kathleen Martin: My question is, say it's $29 a square foot installed, but companies like Home Depot sell it. Is it cheaper if you don't have to have someone install it?

Kathleen Heaney: Yeah, of course.

Kathleen Martin: When they say installed, that means someone comes to your house and does it. If you can just acquire that piece of counter and put it in yourself, it's probably cheaper, right?

Kathleen Heaney: Way cheaper. Though sometimes I think the extra, probably 100 to $300 to get somebody else to come in and do the measurements for you and everything is worth it.

Kathleen Martin: True.

Kathleen Heaney: Let me ask you this, Kathleen, because the biggest problem that people have with laminate countertops is that you can't put anything hot on them. Granite and quartzite, you can put a boiling hot pan on your countertop and it's not going to leave a burn mark. With laminate, I think it's up to 275 degrees. I mean, something that's not very high. You still have to be very careful and put pots on surfaces that can take that heat. In terms of epoxy, it's basically the same thing.

Kathleen Martin: Exactly. If you're getting something budget-friendly, it's not going to take heat either way. Epoxy is just really fragile. It's really hard to get a nice flat surface. I have so many pockmarks and just like divots, because epoxy, as a material, is finicky. Also, we burned it with a toaster oven. I'm wondering, just with the feet of it, which is strange. I feel like epoxy is just a little bit more delicate than Formica is.

Kathleen Heaney: Now, Kathleen was telling me before that certain companies, I think actually the Formica company itself, and I'm sure other companies do this too, they'll put a high gloss on the laminate to make it look even more like stone.

Kathleen Martin: Formica has something called elite form. They say it's more durable, comes in high gloss. Because some natural stone is that glossy finish and they say it doesn't cost anymore. They don't share prices on their website. You have to reach out. We know it's going to be within that $30 average.

Kathleen Heaney: Another cool thing that they've made improvements with laminate since it's heyday, back in the 50s. In the 50s, everything was laminate. It was this chosen surface. Everybody had it in their kitchens. That's why if you buy a home that hasn't been renovated since the 50s, 60s, 70s, a lot of times you're going to see that old style laminate countertop. Actually, in my last apartment, I had it for a little bit and I spilled nail polish remover on the countertop and it took off the entire design.

Kathleen Martin: Oh, no.

Kathleen Heaney: A drop of red wine on my old laminate countertops, it would stay red forever unless I soaked it overnight with some cleaner. They do undermount sinks now with laminate countertops.

Kathleen Martin: The technology all around has improved. They actually said on Formica's website, "You don't have to be worried anymore about spilling red wine onto the laminate. It's going to wipe right off." Whereas if you spill down on marble, yeah, spill down on Carrara. My sister installed a beautiful, enormous Carrara island in our kitchen. Her daughter spilled apple juice on it.

Kathleen Heaney: No.

Kathleen Martin: Etched a huge, huge mark on it.

Kathleen Heaney: Is it still there? Did she get anybody to fix it?

Kathleen Martin: No. It's basically, etch it all, F it all up or buff it out two weeks after it got installed.

Kathleen Heaney: That is heartbreaking. Heartbreaking. Years ago, I bought a marble table from Craigslist and for something like very reasonable, 60 bucks or something. It's heavy. I invited my mom over for dinner a couple of years ago and she left, we were having Mexican food, so she left a little piece of lime sitting directly on the marble. It looks like the bottom of the ocean where like a shell is imprinted. It's so crazy.

Kathleen Martin: Oh, my gosh. Marble is fragile. I didn't realize that.

Kathleen Heaney: Very finicky. If I had to, in my apartment now, I live in a condo, so appropriate, like stone appropriate. I would probably do all quartz if I had the budget to in my apartment. If I had a big house where I wanted countertops in the laundry room and maybe in an office or in a basement area, I would 100%, to save money, do laminate in those spaces.

Kathleen Martin: One of the biggest updates to laminate is the edging. Yes. It's no longer squared off with the brown edges. They now offer all the traditional edges that you would find on a honed countertop. Really cool.

Kathleen Heaney: Beveled and bullnose and all sorts of really cool designs.

Kathleen Martin: Names that I haven't even heard of.

Kathleen Heaney: I know.

Kathleen Martin: It's like ogee or ogee.

Kathleen Heaney: Fancy.

Kathleen Martin: That is something I feel like I need to make a little study book of one day, so I know more about it. All the different ways you can edge a countertop.

Kathleen Martin: Yes, that's scallop-y do looks great.

Kathleen Heaney: I know some countertop edgings are more traditional and other ones are more modern. I just really don't know a whole lot about it. Even just the fact that laminate companies offer that option now is mind-blowing.

Kathleen Martin: They also offer just edging. I don't know how exactly it would work. I think maybe if it was a solid, like how are you going to exactly match the pattern if you got it a long time ago? I saw in Home Depot and Formica that you can just get the bullnose and attach it to update the edges.

Kathleen Heaney: Of your regular laminate countertop.

Kathleen Martin: Squared off, yeah.

Kathleen Heaney: That's interesting. Or if you had a butcher block and you wanted to do a contrast type look, you could do laminate edging on a butcher block.

Kathleen Martin: I hate that.

Kathleen Heaney: Yeah, I know. You're looking at me like, "Oh."

Kathleen Martin: I was trying to agree, but I'm like, "No." I also saw on the Formica website, and this is non-sponsored by Formica, but they had a lot of information. It's not just countertops. It can be anything, vertical surfaces. Actually, maybe it wasn't Formica. I think it might have been blog post, but somebody took a Carrara marble laminate and made a bed out of it or made other pieces of furniture. It looks like this really cool, interesting marble furniture.

Kathleen Heaney: Listen, this episode, Kathleen, we are de-stigmatizing laminate. Because it's really great for design if you want a high-end look, but not that high-end price.

Kathleen Martin: Absolutely. There's so many cool options, and since it's a composite product, you can keep design in mind while still being sustainable. You don't just have to get faux stone, you can get patterns. You saw that website that had lots of cool patterns.

Kathleen Heaney: I mean, lots of cool patterns. I was looking on arborite.com, A-R-B-O-R-I-T-E. They have a collection called their Ink Collection, which is all of these really fun graphic patterns. They also have a collection called Textures, which looks like real wood, but it's laminate. It's got those grain indentations. My mind is blown after looking at some of these updated techniques that they've been using to make these products.

Kathleen Martin: Let me pull it. The textures is indented.

Kathleen Heaney: It looks crazy high-end.

Kathleen Martin: It's like how they started making tiles, floor tiles look like wood. Oh, my God. Look at the Ink Collection.

Kathleen Heaney: I know. This is what I'm saying. You and I are really into aesthetics, but we're also into being reasonable. Maybe if you've been thinking about epoxying your countertops, maybe it's time to just switch over to laminate.

Kathleen Martin: Honestly, I think it's my recommendation because the steps I took to make the counters in my kitchen involved building a custom counter out of plywood. You have that plywood cost, which is high, so at least $80 a sheet. Then we had to buy bullnose. You had to wood fill, blah, blah, blah, and then paint the foam marble and then the epoxy. The epoxy kit was $200. Once you add all that up, I think I just had a negative idea in my mind about laminate because the counters that we were covering were laminate.

Kathleen Heaney: Yes.

Kathleen Martin: The old-fashioned kind. It's like, "Ugh, laminate. I'm going to build it out of wood." Had I known, I could've gotten a more realistic effect.

Kathleen Heaney: Wilsonart, my favorite laminate company, because they're sustainable. I'm looking on their Instagram right now. Kathleen, they have a bathroom featured where the whole wall is laminate and it's called their wet wall design. You can do instead of tile in a bathroom on the walls, on the vertical surfaces, you can do what looks like floor to ceiling marble, but it's laminate.

Kathleen Martin: That's surprising. Wow. I just pulled it up. It looks like a six by 12-inch large marble tile, but it's the whole wall.

Kathleen Heaney: The pictures of the laminate with the gloss on it, truly, there's a picture here on the Wilsonart Instagram of somebody's closet. They have a big walk-in closet and all of their pretty jewelry is spread out on this shiny countertop. It looks so good. Why do you need real stone in your walk-in closet? You absolutely don't. It's a 100% about aesthetic, so save a buck.

Kathleen Martin: On their Instagram, it says that in 2022 they won seven awards, Wilsonart. Two for sustainability, five product design awards that recognize the popularity and innovation of their surfaces.

Kathleen Heaney: My mind is blown and maybe perhaps changed. Because while I do like my solid surface countertops in my bathrooms, they're just plain cream, which is not my favorite. I might be looking into getting some laminate countertops and some cool new undermount sinks to go with them in the future.

Kathleen Martin: This is really cool. Wilsonart has a really good Instagram, shows a lot of real-life examples of kitchens and things like that. Check them out at Wilsonart.

Kathleen Heaney: I also want to point out that one of the biggest strides in laminate countertops is the improvements to printing. When you're printing something that looks like a natural material, at the end of the day, you're printing a repeating pattern. Just like a pattern repeats on wallpaper or on your sheets, it also repeats on laminate. It's so much trickier when you're trying to emulate a natural material like wood or stone, because nature doesn't repeat in a computational way. Am I making sense?

Kathleen Martin: Computational?

Kathleen Heaney: Well, like nature repeats, but it's not predictable. Like a computer can't predict the way in which patterns repeat in nature.

Kathleen Martin: Okay. Got it.

Kathleen Heaney: In terms of laminate flooring, actually Kathleen, you and I were talking about this the other day. The easiest way to spot a cheap forward laminate floor is if your eye can pick up on the repeat in the pattern, like the printed planks that people put in their houses.

Kathleen Martin: I've actually never thought about that until you told me and then it made a lot of sense.

Kathleen Heaney: A high-end laminate product shouldn't have a pattern that your eye easily recognizes. In terms of upgrading, printing, laminate countertops, one of the reasons that they look so high-end now is because companies can print countertops where there is little to no repeat that you can see.

Kathleen Martin: That's the difference between your grandma's laminate. It has better printing, better durability, better edging, better looks, better everything.

Kathleen Heaney: Honestly, I would never, ever pour my own concrete countertop. I would never do epoxy. I would just go the easiest route. Actually, probably the most aesthetically pleasing route, I would go with laminate.

Kathleen Martin: Great budget-friendly option. Sometimes even when you have the budget for real stone, maybe you want something funky.

Kathleen Heaney: True.

Kathleen Martin: Laminate can give you a graphic print or pattern. It's going to give you an option you can't get in stone.

Kathleen Heaney: I want a countertop with kittens and rainbows on it.

Kathleen Martin: I'm sure it's out there somewhere. Now I'm like, "Maybe I can rip out my wood counters. Get some Wilsonart laminate." If you're listening, help a girl out.

Kathleen Heaney: I hope we changed some minds today about laminate countertops.

Kathleen Martin: It is in the future and it can be in your home.

Kathleen Heaney: Everything that we've talked about and more, you can catch it on kathleencandoit.com.

Kathleen Martin: You can follow me, Kathleen Martin, at Create a Colorful Life.

Kathleen Heaney: Me, Kathleen Heaney, at Kathleen Loves Color.

Kathleen Martin: Follow the pod everywhere at Kathleen Can Do It.

Kathleen Heaney: Join our Facebook group. I can't wait for everybody in the group to hear this episode, because there are a lot of people in there, they're like, "Help. My kitchen needs an update."

Kathleen Martin: Yeah, this is going to be huge.

Kathleen Heaney: Don't forget, if Kathleen can do it, you can do it too.

Kathleen Martin: If Kathleen can do it, you can do it too.