Lowes Home Improvement and Home Depot have very inexpensive stock Formica countertops. Your can cut these yourself and save money.

When you do home remodeling, don't get hung up on what everyone says. Be open to new ideas and materials like Lowes and Home Depot's in stock Formica counter tops. These come in a variety of colors and are fine for garages, sheds, storage areas and even basement kitchens if you are on a budget.

In another article, we described reusing our old kitchen cabinets in our garage. We purchased two large pieces of the in stock Formica countertops. On the first piece, we just used a 8 foot standard length on our two 48 inch base cabinets below. It was very easy to install. These Formica countertops have a built in backsplash and a round edge in front. You can also buy end matching Formica strips for the edges.

The countertop for the wall cabinets which we used as base cabinets in our garage was much more challenging. That's because the wall cabinets are 12 inches deep and the standard depth of a kitchen cabinet is 24 inches. What we needed to do was to cut this 10 foot long countertop lengthwise to achieve the appropriate width.

We did this with our portable table saw. The job would have been much easy with an industrial table saw. We were not worried about our ability to cut the countertop lengthwise, because it is made of MDF. We were concerned though about achieving a very clean edge when we cut the Formica. We bought a very fine saw blade made to cut laminates and plastics. This was ideal.

The countertop had a rounded edge in front and a backsplash. We chose to cut on the side toward the backsplash in order to retain the rounded front edge.

With two people holding the one end of the Formica, we cut the countertop along its entire 10 foot length. Now that we had the proper width, we cut another length to use as the backsplash. We also bought a kit and were able to iron the Formica to the sides and top of the backsplash for a finished look. We think the results are very good for our purposes of storage and a working countertop.

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