My sad granite story.....

So. What we found out this morning was that the fabricators had already cut our beautiful granite slab, and that they'd cut it too narrow. And it turns out, unusably narrow. I cried. Because.... well, it's a long story, and I'm just flat out going to tell it.

I HATE shopping. I hate looking at stuff, having to figure out what stuff to get etc. The only time I actually enjoyed it during the extended shopping trip that this fucking remodel has been was when we looked at granite for the kitchen.

We found it pretty quickly. We were positive. It was gorgeous, a granite called "Blue Volga" and we loved it. It looks kinda like this photo, stolen from the web, because it's hard to get a good photo of granite, especially shiny granite.



The shiny things are pieces of mica, they glow a beautiful blue under some lights, and they're big, some egg sized.

That first day, we sat down with the owner of the stone place, and our builder, and talked about what we wanted design-wise. One thing I made VERY clear is that I wanted a full-slab kitchen island. We had the room for it, and I wanted the big space. I nixed the breakfast bar in favour of a large expanse of beautiful granite.

We decided on our stove (cobalt blue!), and eventually had custom tiles made for the backsplash based on that granite.

Project went on, we specc'ed on cabinets in a long painful NASTY process. I said, several times, that I wanted the full slab width on the granite. They talked us out of the extra deep cabinets under one side of the slab, so I said fine, but I still wanted the extra width for the island and they said, sure, whatever.

And then... I asked if the slab would be long enough. Ha ha ha laughed the builder, of course it will. Two hours later... he called dh back. Umm, no, NSM. We needed an extra-long slab, longer than the gorgeous ones we'd initially found.

Sigh.

Off we went to a different stone supplier, Pental in Seattle. And we found some Blue Volga there, and it was big enough. But it was butt-ugly, with much smaller pieces of mica, and more green rather than black and grey.

We kinda said, yeah, sure, but we were bummed. Much of my excitement about the granite was gone, and it was sad. We debated changing the cabinets, but because of cabinet box sizes, we either had to go much smaller, which was not good when it came to the size of the kitchen, or pay A LOT extra for custom cabinets.

Then.... we were at the good granite place (Denali in Woodinville. Highly recommend.), shopping for remnants. And we saw..... A FREAKING GORGEOUS PIECE OF BLUE VOLGA THAT WAS BIGGER THAN THE OTHERS. We measured quickly, and yes, it would be big enough!!!

We spent a weekend on pins and needles, waiting to see if this holy grail of granite was unsold.

And it was. It was ours!

There was much rejoicing. All of a sudden some of the excitement about the project returned.

Last week, we got an email asking us to approve the fabrication of the granite. WAT? we say. Because we'd been told we'd work with the granite fabricator. And this design is not ok. We went a curve to one side, AND it must be bigger, this is waaaaaay too narrow.

We confirm this at the house. And find out they'd bolted down the cabinets, without leaving the gap in the middle that I'd expected. I was already annoyed because most of the drawers in the cabinets were specimen drawers (seriously wonderful if you are storing your butterfly collection in your kitchen, not so much if you are trying to use your kitchen to, well, cook.)

Anyhow, majorly annoyed here. They make a mock up of the slab at their office, we went to see if, and nope, not ok, too small. The plan had been to have fake doors on the "short edges" and I told them, move the cabinets, add a piece of plywood between the fake doors, and let's keep the island bigger.

All this was between the project manager and the designer and us. Then yesterday we get a call that we the builder wants to meet at our place.

We figure they're going to give us the hard sell, difficult to move cabinets, plywood won't look finish, and figured we'd have to fight over who was to pay for this, which, hey, if they'd listened to me, wouldn't be an issue.

They have a full size mockup up of the island again, on my cabinets, and it's pretty clearly too narrow, both visually and functionally. It's esthetically too narrow for its length, it leaves an area of the room as wasted space (and one of the reasons for this remodel was that we had a house with plenty of square feet, about 1/3 of them useless, and this was supposed to correct for this.), and makes the balance of the kitchen look off.

So we confirmed that we wanted the larger island.

Then we heard the truth: the slab was sent for cutting without our approval, it had been cut, nothing to do.

I think I started to cry.

I'm still angry, but more than that, I'm sad. Who the hell at the builder's told the fabricator to go ahead when we hadn't approved the design?

NOTE: they did offer us that slab for free. Fine, nice, a little savings, but who the fuck cares, because I don't have the only fucking slab I've found that I want, ya know?

We spent the morning going to a bunch of granite places in Seattle, looking for a decent slab. We could get ones that were big enough, but they were ugly, or ones that were beautiful, but too small.

Current plan is to give up on granite for now, and just install the cheapest possible countertop, probably laminate, and hopefully over the next year or three, Denali will get another high quality piece of Blue Volga that is big enough. That means my backsplash, with the pretty custom tiles we had made, won't get installed either, and we'll have an ugly kitchen for the foreseeable future. :(

Needless to say, while this is a tiny-ass-sorry-little-first-world-problem, it's a major bummer, and the only recent bright spot in this fucked up stupid project just got extinguished.