More Than You EVER Wanted to Know about the Remodel!

     The biggest happening of this week is my granite got installed.  I looked and looked for the right granite.  We visited many, many, many granite yards and walked up and down aisle after aisle of granite slabs.  Naturally, all the yards are all the way across town.  And Phoenix definitely believes in sprawl, so it was usually anywhere from a 30 minute to one hour trip between our house and a granite yard.  

     Actually, it was very helpful I had granite installed in one of my Texas houses.  I learned then if you have dark wood cabinets, you need light colored granite; otherwise, your kitchen becomes a dark cave.  I also learned if you are going to the expense of granite, you should have ‘movement’ in it.  Movement is the natural variations in the stone.  Otherwise, just buy quartz, or Formica which are all uniform in pattern since they are man made.

   So, I tentatively picked out a few slabs which were ‘OK’. I was able to eliminate 90% of what I’d saw because the slabs were too dark, or the wrong color palette.  What I mean is I didn’t want white/gray granite because I have caramel colored cabinets.  Keep in mind, all granite slabs are stored in giant warehouses on concrete floors.  Oh, how tired my feet were at the end of a 'granite' day.  

Then, late in the game, we decided to add one more stricture:  Our granite slab needed to be three centimeters in width instead of two centimeters.  With a three centimeter piece of granite, you don’t have to glue (the fabricators call it laminate) an edge to the final counter top, you can just work the stone itself into whatever edge you want.  Well, as you can imagine, there’s slab after slab of two centimeter granite, but very few three centimeter slabs.  It’s all about cost.  Two centimeter granite slabs cost less than three centimeter slabs.

Back we go to places we’ve already been to check out any three centimeter slabs we might have missed.  Finally, almost on a whim, we went to one last granite yard which our fabricators recommended, and naturally, my granite slab was there just waiting for me.  I knew it was the one at once. 

It’s got a cream background with veins of caramel just the color of my cabinets with blotches of black, tying in my black appliances, as well as blotches of gray quartz tying in my new stainless steel sink.  An added bonus is at night when the light shines on some parts of the granite, there are some iridescent gold blotches at certain angles.  I love that the most – so unexpected, and subtle enough to be just a wonderful surprise.

Here is my granite in the warehouse

Another thing I learned from my Texas granite purchase, is the entire slab is yours no matter what percentage you use. Thus, we were determined to use every possible inch we could.  Drake actually cut out the counter tops in graph paper, and we manipulated the pieces on our graph paper slab of granite.  We had just enough.  

If you pick someone who can really work stone, then once you get the slab to the fabricator, you're home free. My fabricator even made me a 12” x 12” cutting board out of the cut out piece the sink drops into. Fortunately he carved handles because it weighs about 20 pounds.

Occasionally, there are accidents at granite yards.  Slabs are moved using a forklift equipped with what I think of as a fishing pole.  The chain dangling off the end of the pole has a rubber squeezer on the end, and slabs are fit into the squeezer and lifted dangling.  Then the fork lift moves the slab to wherever it's wanted.  It's how clients seen different slabs when they are stacked on top of one another.  Sometimes when moving slabs, they are dropped!  And when they are dropped, they break.  

Sometimes, fabricators sell back client leftovers to the granite yards, single slabs left over from a sold bundle, called orphans, wind up in the remnant section of a yard as well as the broken pieces from dropped slabs.  When I was looking for my granite, I ran across this fabulous slab which had green, navy blue and pink in it.  It was beautiful, but it was only two centimeters and, I thought pink and chartreuse green were not really my kitchen colors.  I did stop and admire this slab because it was really striking.  The young woman who was helping us mentioned she had a remnant of this granite since one of the slabs was dropped when they were moving it. 

Immediately, I realized what a great opportunity it was to have my built in bedroom vanity top out of this wild looking granite.  Drake negotiated a pittance price for the remnant, and again, realizing we would own the entire piece, I had the fabricator cut and polish the edges of the leftover section to exactly fit the top of another piece of my furniture.

This second piece I had fabricated out of the remnant is portable meaning not screwed down to the top of the furniture.  I glued some felt on the bottom of the granite piece, so it now just sits on the furniture piece, and believe me, it won’t move because it is HEAVY.

Well, now you’ve learned more about buying granite than you ever wanted to know.  It just shows you how consumed we’ve been with this house remodel.  I’m really very pleased with how it’s been going.  Driving today towards Texas, we were congratulating ourselves on meeting all our pre-Christmas deadlines.  

There have been only a few glitches during the process, and when you do this, that’s to be expected.  Fortunately, Drake was a project manager in his former life, so the glitches have been minor, and of someone else’s making.  An example would be the electrician got hung up on another job, was a day late coming to us, and set everything back coming behind him. Luckily, the sheet rock guy worked the weekend, and that got us back on track.

We've been working awfully hard for having hired others to do the bulk of the work.  I'm a 'silver' member of one of the largest on-line sales companies of materials because of my numerous purchases.  Packages have just been streaming into the garage including faucets, rough in valves, light fixtures, shower heads, grab bars and towel racks.  Naturally, one of the bulkiest things we ordered (the kitchen sink) was damaged. To the credit of Build.com, they replaced it immediately.  The fly in the ointment is after a month, the damaged sink is still in my garage since they are fighting with the shipper about who's going to pay for it.  

Yesterday, one day before we left for our Texas Christmas trip, I was in the bathroom finding places I needed to touch up with the new gray paint.  I know myself:  I would just go crazy standing in the new shower seeing some spot I missed painting. Take it from me, it really is much easier to paint a bathroom when there's no toilet, vanity, floor, or shower.  You can drip paint with impunity.  Drake painted the kitchen ceiling, and it was still a drag even though there was no floor to cover.  

When we return from the holidays, you can hear about the trials and tribulations of bathroom remodeling. Won’t that be fun?