Still No Decision

As I mentioned previously, our Mr. Contractor desired our decision on the countertops by this morning. After Marty's taking a vacay day on Friday and going around looking & contemplating even on Saturday, we did NOT come to a conclusion. At first, we thought we had on Friday. We found a prefab that was "acceptable". We came home and reviewed what we found with Mr. C. and he corrected my understanding of the size of the countertops. Instead of 43" and 45" as I thought, they actually measure 46" and 48". Ruh-roh. With the prefab being exactly 8', that doesn't leave much room for any margin of error, or accidental chipping at the end, or even the ability to cut a piece to add to the left end for the bullnose; where the 8' would be cut essentially in half we realize it'd be pushing it. Also, while it comes with the 8' backsplash, the just under 2' end pieces for sidesplash would still have to be purchased, and being prefab, they wouldn't match precisely because they wouldn't be coming from the same piece of stone. Sigh!

Friday night, I emailed Mr. C. and explained to him that I was feeling 'rushed' (ok, we've had 3 weeks, but there's a lot of variables in there thwarting my time) and also requested he provide us with an exact cost on the granite, which we as yet hadn't been able to get from him or the vendor. This decision has been the hardest of anything in the whole process. It's in part our personal taste & indecisiveness, a big part $$, and a part of not having all the info/facts to help make the decision. The assistant at the granite place was there on Sat. and we went down with a couple granite samples from another vendor but they didn't quite match so we won't be able to use them should we pick tiles elsewhere, and she started carrying heavy tiles out to the slab to see if we liked them. After several pieces were brought out, I had to call a halt to this attempt. After all, we haven't yet confirmed we are getting this slab. (Still struggling with getting a 54 or 62 sq. foot slab for approx. 25 sq. feet for 2 countertops - but we can use the remaining on the shower wall with tiles above it-not a total loss.) I didn't feel she was really hearing MY desires as to what I wanted and thought would look good, but was relying more on her own thoughts and preferences. I never thought this would be so difficult.

This is a shot of the whole slab. The photo looks slightly pinkish - there is no pinkishness to it; a lot of brownish tones (not milk chocolate, but semi-sweet in tone), and there's quite a bit of reflective silvery mica as well. We fell in love with this piece and it just seems all else pales...even though we've seen a lot of nice runners-up.

I think this closer pic of the right side of the slab shows a little more of the mica reflections. The background is a bit off-white. The left end reminds me a little of cookies'n'cream ice cream, where some of the browns are near-black.

Hopefully, we'll know sometime tomorrow what this thing will cost. I'm hoping it isn't so high that we end up back to rethinking ourselves and our options. Once it's ours, it can be cut, and we can have a sample to take to a vendor of our choosing to pick the tiles for the tub & shower surrounds and the floor (and I'm thinking it won't be from the same place). A tile place here in our own town had a very lovely woman with more design where-with-all than the lady at the slab place.