LESLIE: Alright, time to get in the kitchen with Craig in Florida. What can we do for you today?
CRAIG: I have a Formica countertop in my kitchen. It’s only about two years old but several of the kids have chosen to use a knife to cut different things on it and there are four or five cuts on the edges and into it. It’s sort of almost white but it’s got little blue flecks and so forth in it. Is there any way to patch it?
TOM: Laminate companies do have repair compounds but they kind of look like the touch-up paint that they used to give you for your car. It never quite looks …
LESLIE: Which is terrible.
TOM: It never quite looks right.
CRAIG: Oh, OK.
LESLIE: You know? So I mean it’s a good, quick fix; especially since it’s only two years old. You know? And if you’ve got young kids that are just going to keep doing it, you might want to just sort of do that quick patching repair just to sort of get through it. I bet if you reached out to the manufacturer – in your case, if it is actually Formica reach out to them; but there’s Formica, there’s Lamin-Art, there’s Wilsonart. All of those folks do make those types of laminates. If not, you can easily, when your kids are more trained to use a cutting board (chuckles) …
TOM: Yeah.
LESLIE: … you can …
CRAIG: Of course.
TOM: Wait ’til the end of the counter-cutting stage.
LESLIE: Mm-hmm.
TOM: When you get to the end of that stage, then you can make a more permanent repair.
LESLIE: Yeah, you can easily relaminate a countertop. I mean it’s not a hard project. All you need to do is pull out your sink and then what you would do is you would abrade the surface of the existing laminate countertop and then you would put contact cement on that surface and contact cement on the surface – on the backside of the laminate, the new one you’re putting in; let them get tacky and then go ahead and adhere the new to the old. And then you can use like – I usually a router to dip in and then cut out all of my sink areas and what other places that I need to inset something.
CRAIG: OK. The kits that you mentioned, for the short term, where would I find those? At like Home Depots and those kinds of places?
TOM: Craig, there’s a website called CabinetParts.com. CabinetParts.com. And on there you’ll find a product called Seamfil and that’s the product that you want to use to repair the cracks or the chips. It’s also used to fill in seams between sheets of Formica …
CRAIG: OK.
TOM: … but it works well on cracks, chips and other little imperfections in addition to the standardized joints.
CRAIG: Terrific. It’s Cabinets – what’d you say? Cabinets what?
TOM: CabinetParts.com and the product is Seamfil. It’s pretty inexpensive; about four bucks a tube.
CRAIG: That sounds terrific. You guys are terrific and thank you and keep up the good work, guys.
TOM: Well, you’re very welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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