The Beauty Of Granite: My Personal Experience
People often wonder what the benefits are when going from laminate to granite countertops. As a distributor of granite I often hear common questions from homeowners considering a granite purchase like: What is the difference between granite, marble and quartz? Do granite countertops require a lot of upkeep? What about radon gas emissions? All of these questions have been addressed in previous blog posts on this website, so I encourage you to browse through those if you have similar questions.
This post deals with another benefit to owning granite countertops. I myself recently changed out my laminate countertops to granite. I chose a stone called Mystic, which has a dark charcoal field with swirls of white, grey and light brown throughout the slab. BuyThisKitchen.com allows their customers to choose the actual slab of material they want in their home. This is not always possible when buying granite from “Big Box” stores and I didn’t want to run the risk of buying material that I have to look at for the next 10-20 years from a sample. Due to the inherent nature of natural stone, there are no guarantees the material will look anything like the sample in the store. Once I picked the slab I liked, my name was written on it and that is the actual material that was installed in my kitchen.
I found the installation process to be quite painless. The day after I purchased my granite a colleague called me to schedule a date to come out and build a template or pattern to take back to the fabrication warehouse. For this procedure I had to clear the items off of my countertop, but he was only there for about an hour and I had use of my kitchen again. Right after the template date the project manager called to line up the schedule for installation. About four weeks later the date arrived. I cleaned out my base cabinets and covered everything with a sheet to keep dust from settling on every little lobster fork the day prior. By 1 p.m. the next day the installers showed up to install my complete countertop. They were finished within about 4 hours, and they were very neat and cleaned up after themselves. What little dust there was from drilling the hole for my faucet was trapped in the sheets I had put out previously and I was very glad I had taken that extra step. Plumbing was not put in until the following day which gave the granite and sink seams and caulking a chance to cure. I was able to move everything back into my kitchen by the third day and it was business as usual.
I chose to seal my granite again 48 hours after it was installed as suggested by Buythiskitchen.com
with a product called Stone Shield Penetrating Sealer. It brought out the colors and patterns in my granite more vividly and now my countertop resists moisture beautifully.
It has been almost two months since the installation of my Mystic granite countertop and as an added bonus I find it more beautiful each day. Every day I notice some new and delightful aspect about the patterns and swirls that I didn’t see before. This decision has also improved the resale value of my home. Overall I have been very pleased with the change to granite and I believe I will enjoy its beauty more and more as time passes.
Lisa Holcomb, Assistant Sales Manager
Buythiskitchen.com
