Progress

base cabinets all installed

Much progress has been made during the last week.   All of the base cabinets have been installed and the granite guys were here on Tuesday making templates for the island and counter tops.  It seemed so exciting — and the carpenter and I sat and talked about the schedule which would have the kitchen, not finished, but operational in 10 working days.  That’s two weeks folks!

When will we learn?  The next day as the carpenter was hard at work (and so was I down in my basement) the granite guys called and said that the templates would not fit on the granite slabs that we had selected due to the broken off pieces on the center edges of two of them.  Broken off pieces?   What broken off pieces?

Back in August (and I barely can remember back that far, but I know that I was wearing shorts and sneakers on that day) we were at the giant warehouse full of granite and marble slabs and had picked 3 beautiful ones  for our counter tops to be made of.  While moving two slabs with a giant crane that hangs from the ceiling, they had broken one of the slabs we were selecting from with the clampy-thingie (that’s a technical term) that was holding the slab up in the air.  The guy quickly lowered it before it totally fell and of course we said, “we don’t want that one”.  Specifying the slabs we did want by number and not looking at the back side of the 3rd one (didn’t want to make the guy take any more time) we committed mistakes 1 and 2.   We signed off on our selection and the granite fabricator, who actually buys the slabs was called that we had made the selection.

Oh — mistake # 1 was not marking the edges of the slabs we had selected with our name and mistake # 2 was not looking at the back of the 3rd slab.

When the guys actually went to cut the granite, there was not enough good granite to cut our tops.  They sent photos via email1313 and sure enough, there was a photo of the slab that had been broken by that clampy-thingie.   The stone warehouse had delivered at least one if not two wrong slabs.  And the third one wasn’t going to be used at all because a big piece was broken off the corner and the back had a big crack filled with epoxy to hold it together that would have been done at the quarry.

So, after removing 10 inches of drifted snow off the driveway and navigating some pretty bad local roads this morning, hubby and I caravanned our cars down to Norwalk to that giant warehouse again to pick two new slabs.

Granite from the same mountain was still available, but I’m pretty sure it’s a bit darker than the rejected granite.  But it is also MUCH larger — both slabs are probably 50% larger than the original ones selected and — this is IMPORTANT — when we left the warehouse, not only were they intact, but they both had our names on them.