The Stone Collection

We are the first people to live in our house that have actually owned it. The original owners bought it as a rental property, and everything in it is builders’ grade. That’s fine. It’s the reason we were able to afford it. And it gives us a chance to make upgrades that suit our style.

Like the kitchen counters. They are currently laminate, and there are several spots where hot pots have been placed on them and left marks. We decided to replace them with granite. We contacted a guy who specializes in this. He measured the counters and told us what we needed. Our job was to go to the Stone Collection in Denver and pick out the granite slab we wanted.

There are nine grades of stone, 1 (the cheapest) -7, exotic, and super-exotic (which can be semi-precious stone). We were obviously looking at the low end.

This was a little discouraging, because there were some pretty amazing slabs of stone there, and none of them were 1’s. Or 2’s.

But all the 1’s were pretty dull. This was the best of them, and I thought it looked boring. Another one looked like it was made of smashed tater tots.

My wife went back and forth between two or three of them, holding up the drawer from one of our cabinets to see if it matched. I walked all the aisles and looked for a 2 or 3 that matched better and looked nicer.

I found this. It’s called “Suede” and it’s from India.

At that point, a woman who worked there walked up and asked if we needed help. We asked her if she had a good eye. The woman claimed she did, and when we held our cabinet up to Suede, she immediately said it was a good match. It was a 2, but it’s also the only thing we saw that really matched our counters and appliances, so that’s good.

We showed her the 1’s we were looking at, and she shook her head. She said they were all builders grade and can be found everywhere. We reserved our slab so the builder can pick it up and cut it to fit our kitchen.

Oh, some of the ones I took photos of … People with more money that we have sometimes buy them and hang them on the wall as art. One last comment about The Stone Collection—they had really impressive bathrooms.

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