Countertop woes and next stop – Montana

August is over already! Our Seattle vacation ended this morning and we said a sad farewell to our hosts, (now friends) Amy and Ian. We hope to be back next year. We really enjoyed our month in Seattle.

I have several Seattle posts yet to write, but meanwhile I want to keep you up to date in real time. Otherwise it gets confusing for those of you who are in contact with us tracking our progress, if everything I post is two weeks or even a month delayed. I’m behind on my posts…another glass blowing adventure, another major hike, a day trip to Olympia, Alki Beach from yet another perspective…

I am getting tired of uploading vacation pictures, but I know I have some readers who like them. And I still have a lot of photos to share! So yes, I will go back and finish those soon.

We plan to swing through Montana on our way to Albuquerque. We want to check out Flathead Lake. It’s not too far out of our way as we head southeast back to Albuquerque, where John needs to return to work. He’s been occasionally working remotely from Seattle this month, but he has a backlog of work that has to be done in person.

Meanwhile, I am getting nervous about the remodel and keep thinking I should be in Tucson to keep an eye on that. Our countertop project is giving us grief. Remember how much trouble we had with floor tile? We’re having even more trouble with countertop. Although we still don’t have our floor tile either. We ordered it a long time ago and the ship date has slipped twice.

The countertop hasn’t even been ordered yet. We thought we had countertop figured out already, but the quotes came in a lot higher than we expected, so we went back to square one. We decided to go with quartzite, which is a natural stone, instead of quartz, which is a man-made stone. Somehow real quartzite is cheaper than manmade quartz, even though that doesn’t make any sense to me.

The challenge with natural stone is it’s hard to find something that is subtle enough for my taste. I don’t like busy, clashy patterns with a lot of colors and contrast. Most natural granite and quartzite options have too much visually going on, which I find disorienting when working in the kitchen.

After quite a search, I finally found quartzite that I like. There is a set of slabs at a slab yard in Phoenix that I want – but it’s frustrating because I can’t put a hold on them without buying them. And I can’t just buy them either. The fabricator is supposed to do that – he gets a discount.

I’m almost tempted to not worry about the discount and just buy them, but I don’t even know how many slabs we need to buy until the fabricator tells me. I think we need three of them, but it might be just two. If I buy three and turn out to only need two, I can’t return the third. On the other hand, if I buy two and need a third, it’s likely I won’t be able to get the exact right slab to match the original two. If I need three, I’ll need three consecutive slabs – they are natural stone and the color and pattern won’t line up right if we don’t buy them as a bundle. Any day now someone else could buy the middle one of the run of three that I need, and then the other two would be useless to me and I’ll be back to square one again. Argh. And the fabricator isn’t returning our calls. We’ve contacted a second fabricator who isn’t returning calls either.

My instinct is to get on a plane and go out to Tucson and get everything fixed. Except even if I were to go out to Tucson, we’d still just be waiting for a fabricator – any fabricator – to call us back. There’s probably nothing additional I could do about the countertop from Tucson that we can’t do over the phone from Seattle or Montana or Albuquerque.

The quartzite will be somewhat cheaper than the quartz, but it’s still not cheap. Unfortunately, John and I don’t overlap on our opinions regarding viable cheap options. I would just use tile, but that means grout lines, and John is not a fan. Or I’d do Corian, which is a modern version of formica, but John would hate it. He would do butcher block – everywhere. Which would be affordable, but I’m vetoing that idea because in my experience, wood will get funky.

Granite is an option too – quartzite and granite are very similar, both are natural stones and both are quite hard and durable, and they are similarly priced. Granite tends to have spotted patterns and quartzite tends to have more linear patterns like marble. Both quartzite and granite are harder than marble.

Here is a picture of one of the quartzite slabs that I want, but I’m trying not to get my heart set on it and get my hopes up, because there’s no guarantees yet. But if this works out, I think the rust colored veins will tie in well with the terracotta floor tile. And it seems restful to look at, rather than jarring, and it looks natural.

I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Meanwhile, hopefully I’ll get some more of the remaining Seattle photos posted as we drive across Washington, the northern Idaho panhandle, and into Montana today. Handling photos can be somewhat difficult in a moving vehicle, so no promises. We’ll be camping for the next several days as we work our way east and then south to Albuquerque. But I expect to have enough cell reception to keep up with my blog.

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.