Corian, and other solid surface materials used in the kitchen and bath, are generally sold only to certified installers in order to maintain the long warantees on the finished product. This is most annoying to a longtime Do-It-Yourselfer. I want to make some simple shelves lined with Corian, and a backsplash for my tub. Anyone know a place that will sell it to ordinary schlubs?
- You can apparently buy entire sheets of Corian, but it sounds like you still have to buy it from a distributor. But I don’t see how they could force you to accept their “authorized installation” of a couple of blank sheets of Corian.
http://www.dupont.com/corian/a/en/h/Products/StandardandWideSheets.html
http://www.dupont.com/corian/a/en/h/Locators/LocateaDistributor.html
- Are you in the US?
http://www.apkitchens.com/KitchenTops.html
UK.
http://www.kitchen-worktops-plus.co.uk/corian_kitchen_worktops.htm
I don’t see anything on here offhand that says “You must allow us to come to your home and install this ourselves”. It looks like they’re not selling blank Corian by-the-foot, it looks like they’re selling “cut to your template” Corian.
Corian is a registered trademark of DuPont. They require factory certification for installers.
Note their website FAQ:
Also:
Basically, since it’s their stuff, they can have requirements to be met so that their reputation doesn’t suffer. Yeah, I know, I’d like to play with it, too.
You may be able to find a similar product, though. Check here
Meant to add this, too: You might want to call around some local suppliers for solid color or composite countertops.
If nothing else, talk a local Corian installer into giving you some scraps (as long as this doesn’t violate some trade agreement he has with DuPont).
Good Luck!
NoClueBoy (not living up to his name) had the answer for that… They can’t force you to have them install it, but they just won’t sell it to you unless you are certified.
And the whole thing is that I want to do the cutting, not have someone else manufacture it for me. Plus some of the things I’d like to do involve site work.
I had heard that there were some certified installers who purchase the stuff and then re-sell over the net. Was hoping to get a line on one. Unless they are just a handyman’s urban legend.
Oh, sorry I wasn’t clear… I’d settle for any solid surface material. They all seem to have the same deal with certified installers.
Reported.
It’s the North Corian spammers that are a real problem.
So, you are strong in the qwartz?
One interesting thing about Corian is that it was originally promoted to the general market. Magazines like Popular Mechanics had articles about how nice it was to work with.
I did my first Corian job back around 1989 and it was very difficult to find anyone willing to sell me the sheet goods. I had sent away to DuPont for all the material they had on working with it, basically what they use to teach installers. I did manage to find a kitchen and bath store that sold me the sheets after much questioning about how powerful my machines were, and if my skills were worthy. Heck, I was a skilled woodworker and machinist, I wasn’t worried about some difficult material. It turned out to be not difficult at all.
Corian is simply the neatest stuff in the world to work with. It cuts like butter. No grain to worry about. Chips from the router float in the air like plastic potato chips.
You do have to be careful. A sheet was frightfully expensive and it was measure 4 or 5 times and lay it out before cutting. It glues together absolutely invisibly if care is taken.
Gluing it is traumatic. A tube of glue (about $10) does 30" of seam. It has to be mixed for 3 minutes and has a 5 minute life from when you started mixing. It is slippery beyond all comprehension. When you clamp it, the pieces just slide around. I ended up using pre-installed stops for every piece so I could glue and clamp rapidly. You need to double up all the edges to get a nice thick appearance so there are lots of pieces involved.
I got into some advanced techniques not even covered in the DuPont guides. I made a custom range vent hood from the thin stainless steel liner of an Atlas Centaur rocket oxygen tank. It stuck out too far so I partially recessed the hemisphere into the kitchen wall.
Corian is acrylic plastic with aluminum tri-hydrate filler, so I figured it would bend with heat like ordinary acrylic. I made a felt lined wooden mold and heated the Corian backsplash in the oven and formed it into a curve that matched the radius of the recess. The semi-circular backsplash was glued to the straight pieces on either side and appears as one piece.
It turned out so well a friend hired me to do the huge kitchen and bath in his home being built. This time his general contractor bought the material.
A few years ago I bought dozens of scraps from a counter top installer, although since then I have had no use for them.
The last thing I did make was pretty neat. We remodeled a fairly small bathroom and used a fancy corner toilet to gain room.
The client wanted a taller seat height, but it was not available in a nice corner toilet. I copied the intricate base of the toilet (see link) in 2 layers of Corian that continued the pattern and we glued it under the base. It looked fantastic!
Dennis
That’s really cool to hear about; neat idea to raise a toilet. If this was a remodel, how did you raise the flange just a couple inches? If you have any pix of the rocket tank range hood that’d be cooler yet.
I bet the OP’s project is long-since completed or abandoned. 2004 was a long time ago.
Here in 2017 does anyone still spec Corian for anything noncommercial? Or for anything at all? Seems like last century’s fad to me, but that may just be my local selection bias.
My mom did kitchen and bathroom design for 20 years (from around 1985 to 2005), getting into the industry just as Corian was the hot (and pricey) thing. She had their kitchen redone in '86, and it was a big deal then that she used Corian.
But today? I’m not entirely up to speed on current home design trends, but I wind up watching a lot of home design TV shows by osmosis (i.e., my wife loves HGTV), and I don’t think I can recall seeing anyone choosing to use Corian in a kitchen or bath redesign in any of those shows, in years.
For kitchens, at least, it seems like every show has them using some sort of granite or composite stone counter surface. (Edit: here’s an article on HGTV.com, on “Our 13 Favorite Kitchen Countertop Materials” – not a mention of Corian.)
Apparently. It was a spammer selling the stuff (now deleted) that bumped the thread.
It was a remodel but we replaced all the waste piping so the flange was no problem.
I think Corian type materials have given way to natural stone as those prices came down. I still rather like it, it is softer and not so cold to the touch. Plus I was interested in doing it myself, I had no stone experience. In the one photo you can see a towel rack on the left, I machined them from the same Corian along with custom handles for the refrigerator and freezer.
Here are a couple of photos of the counter top and range hood. Note the heat formed backsplash in the wall. What a pain in the ass Photobucket is, hope it works.
Dennis
They work, but appear to be downsized thumbnails. Thanks for the effort. Still I get the idea and admire the craftsmanship. Bravo!
Ref kenobi_65, when Corian came out they touted the cast-in sink as the major cool feature. To me it was the major fatal bug, since inevitably the sink’ll get much more scratched and stained than the rest of the surface. Yet by being cast-in it’ll be completely non-replaceable. As well they always cast it out of the light non-mottled colors so it would quickly show any dirt and damage.
But for that *faux pax *it might have had a much longer run as the material of choice. Instead it has all the cachet of Formica for all the price of mid-plus range granite. Oops.
You should be able to click on the “+” and make it bigger.
The under-mount sinks are not cast in. They are glued from underneath and the joints machined to be smooth. That’s the beauty of the material, any shape can be built up out of any combination of colors.
The sinks could be removed with a wing cutter in a router. The bearing on the cutter rides against the sink and you just zip around the perimeter. If the replacement sink is larger just cut around the existing with a saber saw.
If the sink comes close to the backsplash you need an offset router head like this, scroll down a few posts:
Dennis
even apartments are using real stone now for counter tops.
Interestingly, and maybe because she was working in the industry and new better, my mother didn’t go with cast-in sinks in her kitchen (she went with a stainless sink).
They still have the Corian counters; the kitchen looks a little dated now, but they’ve held up very, very well.
Yeah, mine are what, 28 years old already. They are easy to sand out with Scotch-Rite abrasive pads and can be given a mirror polish like a car if you wanted to.
The ones I really like are the Sierra series like I used. Very natural, tight-grained granite appearance.
The sink is a Sili-Quartz sink by Blanco. The same type of material. The wife was complaining it was scuffed and she wanted stainless steel. She keeps forgetting to use a mild abrasive on it. 5 minutes with Soft Scrub with bleach and it looks like showroom new. I do not like stainless sinks.
Dennis
Here’s one way of approaching the problem. Tell an installer you want an “island” installed in the garage. You provide a base. Some sawhorses or dummy cabinets. Whatever satifies the installer. The island is the size of a standard sheet you want to buy.
Contractor comes in, puts the sheet on the sawhorses or whatever. You pay. Now you have the sheet.
No doubt you’re paying extra, but it’s a thought.