January 2012 - Page 2 of 4

Santa Cecilia Granite: It Ain’t All the Same

Austin Granite Girls, Granite Spotlight

Want Santa Cecilia Granite like Your Neighbors Have?

Santa Cecilia Dark from SGM - July 2012 Austin TX

You’ll need to go pick out the exact material for your kitchen to make sure you get just what you want.

If you don’t, the Santa Cecilia might be waaaay different than what you were expecting.

We can fab almost any thing you pick into the perfect new granite counters for your home or business.

Different Types of Santa Cecilia

To give you an idea, here are some of the names under which Santa Cecilia granite is sold:

Santa Cecilia Classico
Santa Cecilia Dark
Santa Cecilia Amarillo
Santa Cecilia Extra
Santa Cecilia JG

Some of that material is creamy, with flecks of brown, caramel, gold and garnet. Some of these granites are much more yellow, some are much darker and some have more black strips and squiggles than others.

Santa Cecilia is super popular in Austin probably because it goes with almost any color of kitchen or bathroom cabinetry – from white to medium-toned browns to dark brown or espresso. If your cabinets are painted with other colors like green, grey or blue you’ll probably want something other than Santa Cecilia for your counters.

Images of Santa Cecilia Granite at our Austin Granite Shop

We snapped a few photos of the granite remnants we have for sale for small spaces (small counters). ALl of these are granite remnants from the type of granite commonly called “Santa Cecilia”.

Look the same to you?

Fitting a Kitchen Faucet on a Granite Countertop: Getting Ready for Granite

Austin Granite Girls, Getting Ready for Granite

Replacing Older Counters with a Granite Countertop?

If your faucet is old, you might not be able to re-use it.

Many older counters are thinner than the typical thickness of the granite installed in the Austin area. Most of the granite found in Austin is 3cm thick (3 centimeters, or about 1.18 inches). Many older faucets don’t have enough threading to clamp on properly to the thicker counters.

Confused? It’s not nearly as hard as it might sound to figure this out.

Here’s how it went: old counters were often made from thinner material, so faucets were made to fit them. Newer counters are often thicker and some (but not all) of the newer faucets are designed to fit onto thicker counters (while still fitting on thinner counters, too).

Your best bet is to put in a new faucet when you replace your old counters.

The old one will just get taken out still attached to the counters. If you want to save it for some other project, you can remove it before the counters are hauled away.

How Do You Figure Out if the Faucet Will Fit on New Granite Counters?

If you are absolutely determined to re-use your old faucet, you need to do some research and planning ahead of time:

You can take off the old faucet and see if it has enough threads for a thicker granite counter (1.18″ or more).
You might have the technical specifications sheet that came with the faucet and it will show the maximum counter thickness the faucet can handle. The line-drawing on the left gives you an idea of what to look for.
You might look up the faucet model number on the manufacturer’s web site and look at the diagrams they have on-line, or you may want to call their customer service number and ask.

What To Do If You Don’t Know What To Do

If you are not certain your old faucet will fit, you might want to buy a back-up from a local big box store and have it on-site on the day your counters are installed. That way if your old faucet won’t work, you have another one. If you don’t need it, you can take it back.

We need the faucet on-site before we drill the holes (one to four of them) so you don’t have to arrange for a service call later for us to come back and drill the holes. (Plus, you will probably want your plumber to hook up your sink and faucet as soon as possible so you can start using your kitchen (or bathroom) again!!

Granite Seams: The Granite Biz Series

Austin Granite Girls

Getting New Granite Counters?

Want seams all over the place, running here and there and everywhere?

Didn’t think so.

Some Granite Seams Are Unavoidable.

One of the signs of a cut-rate (and cut-quality) granite fabricator is counters with a lot of seams – or more specifically – a lot of unnecessary seams.

So, what makes for a necessary seam? Here are some situations where a seam is unavoidable:

When the counters are longer than the granite slab: If a counter is 150-inches long, and the granite slab is 120-inches wide, the counter will have a seam. A good granite fabricator will put the seam in the least-conspicuous place, and avoids placing seams in areas that might make it more likely to break.

When the counters have a really big corner and/or the kitchen is hard to get to: The exaggerated example for this is a second-floor kitchen on a hillside home with a narrow staircase. If you’re rich, you could have a crane bring the counter in through the huge picture window that was removed for the day, but it real life that Just. Never. Happens. Usually, you have a bunch of guys carrying in the counters and if they can’t navigate safely up the stairs, the kitchen counters will be in smaller pieces (but again – as few as possible).

What makes for an optional (client-elected) seam?

When the material is super-crazy expensive and the client wants to use every last scrap: This happens. Not often, but sometimes. This is not recommended because every seam is a potential point of weakness in the counters and if you’re going to spend oodles on exotic granite counters, you don’t want seams that jump out at you every day. In general, it works better to pick a less expensive material to get enough to do the job with fewer seams.

When the material is remnant granite and it takes two matching smaller pieces to make the counter long enough: We don’t see a lot of this, either. Sometimes we do have a fabulous pair of remnants that can be combined to make a longer counter. We’ve done this for gamerooms, TV alcoves and the occasional really long master bathroom counter. In each case, the client really really really wanted a specific granite that just wasn’t the right size without a seam.

When you must have a seam, you want a granite company that can match the colors and movement (designs) in the counters to make your seams as inconspicuous as possible. If you have a big kitchen getting new granite counters, talk to us about where the seams will be and how we can best lay out your material to make the counters look good. We’ll put in as few as possible, and will join the edges as cleanly as the material permits. You won’t be sorry that you took the time to go over it with us!

Granite Fabrication Explained: The Granite Biz Series

Austin Granite Girls

Confused by Granite Fabrication Terms?

In the Austin granite biz, the people that transform granite slabs into granite countertops are called fabricators.

The fabricator may be just one person, but it is usually the term for the whole company – the group of people that work together to turn granite slabs into kitchen or bathroom counters.

Who’s On First?

So, the company that makes counters is the granite fabricator, but the guy that applies the edge profile is also called the fabricator, not to be confised with the cutter, or the polisher. So the fabricator (edge-profile cutting guy) works for the fabricator (the granite fabrication company) who fabricates the granite slabs into granite counters.

Clear as mud?

The Steps for Making Granite Counters

When we send orders out to fab that means we’ve sent a diagram out to the granite shop floor.

The diagram will be used by the cutter to mark and cut the slab.

After the cutter cuts the squares, rectangles, kitchen islands and whatnot, he sends it to the next station in the shop – to the fabricator – the guy that actually cuts the shape of the edge of the granite, i.e. the granite edge profile.

The fabricator then does the initial shaping of the profile of the granite edge. If the counter will get a bullnose edge, he uses the tool that puts that edge on the counter. When the fabricator is done with the initial shaping of the edge, he sends it to the last station in the shop – to the polisher.

The polisher then smooths and polishes the edges of the counter until they are uniformly smooth and even and ready to be installed.

A Granite Tabletop Turns a Cheap Table into a Custom Table

Granite Table Tops and Marble Table Tops

This is a cheap table.

As in, a few hundred dollars for the whole set, purchased at a discount furniture store in Austin in 2010.

Doesn’t look so cheap, if you look closely. (If only we had taken a better photo!).

We topped it with a piece of 2cm thick (about 3/4-inch) granite with a flat-polish edge and used it to stage a home for sale. It now serves as the kitchen table for a family of four in Northwest Austin.

Updating an Inexpensive Table

If you have one of these inexpensive tables you probably know that the original factory finish isn’t very good. It scratches easily, and will get cloudy if you set down a hot plate or casserole dish.

If your cheap table is looking, well, cheap, you can top it with a granite top. A new top is often cheaper than buying a new table!

Most of the granite remnants we have are too heavy for tables on spindly legs, but sometimes you can get lucky and find a granite remnant that will work. Just measure the table you have and pop us a quick email and we’ll let you know what we have that might work for putting a granite tabletop on your old (or new) table.

If you have a table with heavier legs, like an old country-style farmhouse table, you’ll have even more options.

Vintage Austin Kitchen Makeover: The One That Got Away

Austin Granite Girls, Exciting Offers, Granite Kitchens

Want to See a Vintage Kitchen Makeover?

So did we.

This vintage kitchen is from a house built in the late 1950s in the Wooten area of Austin, Texas. We tried unsuccessfully to buy it, dashing our fantasies of remodeling this dated house.

It’s the one that got away. And yes, we’re still talking about it.

And, apparently, sharing it with you.

The Costs of Updating a Small Kitchen in Austin

This house is small, like about 1,100 square feet of small, with only one bathroom and three tiny bedrooms. And, of course, the kitchen is small, too.

If you are considering buying one of these little old homes in the Austin area (or already own one), you may be struggling with how to gauge what it will cost to fix it up.

One of the blessings of such a small home is that virtually everything that you might want to do will cost less simply because there is less of it. Even if you upgrade to nicer-quality finishes, you can still get it done on a budget.

Your Kitchen Makeover Budget

Your kitchen makeover budget might include:

New counters
Cabinet paint and painting supplies
Cabinet hardware
New flooring
New appliances
Wall paint
New light fixtures and outlets
A sink and faucet
Backsplash tile

For now, most of that list is a lot more than we can cover in a single post, so we’ll try to link in articles as we find them (and write them).

For today, let’s just talk about the counters, and about painting the cabinets.

The Cost of New Granite Counters

The worn-out laminate counters in a small kitchen like this in Austin can almost always be replaced with lovely granite countertops for less than $1200. That price point will get you Uba Tuba granite (dark green/black with medium-size flecks of color), or Santa Cecilia granite (cream with flecks of gold and brown, with speckles of garnet).

These two inexpensive granites are favorites of our customers because they both look more expensive than they are, and they are chameleons that go with almost any decorating scheme. For another $150 or so (depending on the square footage of the counters), the counters could be upgraded to Black Pearl granite, a material that wins hands-down for updating a home across a lot of different styles: it can go super-traditional with white subway tile, or super-modern with glass tile and glossy, flat-front cabinets.

Black Pearl is our go-to favorite.

If $1200 still sounds like a lot to you take note: we’ve had several small ktichens jobs come through recently that were each under $1000! WOOT!

If the kitchen has an island (or you’re going to add one), you can almost always find a really pretty granite remnant from the back of our shop that will fit and can help bring down the overall cost of your new granite counters.

A small island (36-inches x 42-inches) almost always comes in under $350 if it is made from one of our remnants.

Painting Old Kitchen Cabinets

The cabinets in this particular kitchen were solid wood, and were in good condition despite being covered in grease from years and years of cooking. If you really want to save money on refinishing your old cabinets, you can paint them yourself.

The DIY bloggers behind Young House Love have written several great cabinet painting tutorials. Once you’ve read that one (the basics), you may find their latest series on kitchen cabinet painting to be a fascinating read.

If you DIY your kitchen cabinet painting, you can get it done for under $200, even if you use good paint (like Benjamin Moore’s Satin Impervo, or their newest cabinet paint, Benjamin Moore Advance).

If we had managed to buy the house in the photo above, we would have painted the cabinets a classic white-almost-ivory, for a clean and timeless look, using Benjamin Moore’s Cloud White Satin Impervo (oil).

The Cost of Replacement Kitchen Hardware

You can frequently find cabinet hardware on ebay for cheap cheap cheap. Just make sure to read the reviews before you buy. We bought all of the hardware for this kitchen makeover for under $150, and it had a LOT of cabinets.

In the big box stores, you can find knobs for as cheap as $1 to $2 each (even ones that feel good in your hand), and handles for as little as $2 to $4. If you really want to save on hardware costs, stick to the knobs and skip the pulls.

Your Own Austin Vintage Kitchen Makeover

If you actually read this far: congratulations! If we put in granite kitchen counters (25 or more square feet, which is about one 10-foot long counter) in your Austin home, mention this article and we’ll thrown in an 18-gauge, stainless steel undermount sink for free (a $100 value).

Archives for January 2012