Construction Blogging: Don't Take It For Granite

Don't you just hate when people get phrases wrong, like saying "Don't take it for granite" instead of "Don't take it for granted"?  I hate that, too, but I needed a cute play on words for the title of this post, which is largely about granite, so there you go.

 

A little more has gotten done at the house this week, but guess what?!  The damn electrician STILL has not been here!  LCUB got our new pole and transformer put in, but they can't connect it until the electrician gets his crap done.  I am literally ready to murder him.

 

I'm also ready to murder everyone at Triton Stone over our granite issues.  I'm going to try to make a long story short, but that may be impossible.  A few weeks ago, we went to Triton to look for granite.  We were assisted by a very helpful guy, who turned out to be their outside sales rep who deals with our cabinet/countertop people.  After looking at zillions of slabs of granite, we found the lot we wanted.  The only problem?  Some other lady had "tagged" all except one of the slabs (they will hold tagged slabs for 14 days for you to make your final choices and pay for them).  We need two slabs.  So the guy who was helping us said he would call around and see if he could find any more slabs in that lot.

 

We went back a few days later to check the status, and we saw that they had three slabs of that granite that were not tagged.  We were super excited and asked them to move the slabs around so we could look at all three and select two (the slabs are stacked up against each other).  The guy who helped us the first time wasn't there, so we were dealing with another guy who was super annoying.  Anyway, they unstacked the slabs, and we discovered that there was only one full slab.  One of the others had the bottom left quarter broken out of it, and the last untagged slab had a crack in the middle, so you couldn't use the whole slab.  The other lady still had two slabs tagged (and she happened to be there at the same time and was very nice, so I couldn't stab her like I wanted to).

[This is where I had to take a 24-hour break from writing this blog because I was getting too angry.]

So the guy we're dealing with at that point says, "Well, you can get the one full slab plus the two broken ones, and that should be enough.  Or you can get the one full slab [which has this really cool vein in it that I like], use that slab for your kitchen island [so we can see the vein], and get a slab from the same quarry but a different block to do your perimeter countertops."  After wasting time looking at slabs from other blocks, however, yet another person tells us that if the granite is from a different block it won't match up with the other slab and will look terrible.  So basically we've talked to three different people at this point and gotten three different opinions on our granite.  We ended up just leaving the warehouse because we were so frustrated, and we called our cabinet/countertop people to see if they could make some sense of the various granite people.

The cabinet/countertop guys said the granite people weren't willing to give us a good enough deal on the broken slabs to make it worth buying all three slabs (the full one and the two broken ones).  He talked to his rep (the first guy we dealt with), who was able to track down two more full slabs from the same granite block at a store in Asheville and said he would have those slabs in the warehouse the next week for us to come select the two we liked best.  When I called the next week, however, he said the guy who owns the shop in Asheville had come down with the flu or something and asked him to wait until he was back in the shop to pick up those slabs.  The week after that, I get a call saying that the guy in Asheville has SOLD the two slabs (from his death bed, I guess?), but they've found ONE MORE slab in Charlotte.  So they're planning on picking up the slab in Charlotte sometime this week (I think), and I guess we just have to pray that it works since that will leave us with the exact number of slabs we need.  Oh, and did I mention that when we were talking about that, the guy said, "If I can get that one slab out of Charlotte, you should be able to use it and the two broken slabs you have tagged here, and that will get you at least two full slabs."  Umm, no. We have a FULL slab tagged here, and you weren't willing to deal with us enough on the broken slabs, so we aren't buying three slabs just  to get two useable ones. So now I wouldn't really be surprised to find out that they've sold the one full slab out from under us or that the one slab in Charlotte gets sold before they go pick it up.  ARRRRRGGGHHHH!!

Anyway, to get my blood pressure back down, I decided to close out this blog with the good things that have gotten done over the past couple of weeks.  The tile guys have been here, and they have been fabulous.  They work quickly and neatly, and they always make sure all of the windows and doors in the house are locked before they leave (I do a sweep every night and usually end up having to close and/or lock at least one window).  They've finished the tile in the upstairs bathroom and in the entryway from the garage (consisting of the old laundry room, the pantry area, and the new laundry room).  This pic shows the tile in the upstairs bathroom.  It's the same tile in the entryway area, but they got it covered with paper (to protect it from ongoing construction) before I remembered to get a picture of it.

They've also been working really hard in the master bath.  They finished the floor in the shower and have also finished the tile on the shower walls but haven't grouted it yet.

 

They've also finished the master bathroom floor, but again, I neglected to get a picture of it before it was covered.  It's the same tile that's on the shower walls, only in 2x2 squares.

The "step guy" came back a couple of weeks ago and finished the balusters.  That little job definitely made the house look more finished (even though, you know, we still have plywood floors). 

Phillip had a few of his guys here this past week finishing up the beams on the back deck and also finishing up the trim inside the house.  So we're moving forward, but this electrical thing is holding up EVERYTHING else.  Our cabinets are ready to install, but we can't install those until the hardwood is down, and we can't install the hardwood until the A/C is on (neither cabinets nor hardwood will hold up to the humidity that's in the house right now). Our builder was on vacation last week, but we will be in touch with him first thing tomorrow about the electricity.  It's about to get real.