The Yelp reviews for this place seemed to good to be true... I mean, 1/4 the price of Home Depot? Invisible seams? And except for Kimberly K., the reviewers didn't have many reviews... were they shills, or relatives of the proprietor? I don't think you can blame me for being suspicious, especially now that it looks like they are a Yelp sponsor.
So the answer to the are they perfect question is... no. But, they ARE great. I'm going to focus on the negatives to balance out the other glowing reviews, but I was very happy with their work and will use them again when doing the counters in my bathrooms.
I called one other independent place for an estimate before I called Austin Granite Direct. Their estimate came in around the same as Jose's. However, Jose was much better during the visit and after. He talked me through the whole process, asked questions, and explained everything really well. As an example, he said a lot of people replaced their backsplashes (I had to ask what those were) at the same time, but it wasn't necessary, they only broke tile in about 1/30 jobs, and the tiles were easy to replace if they were still in production. He did say some customers called them back to do the backsplashes afterwards and that was harder to do. (I ended up replacing my tile backsplashes with polished marble because my "decorator" said the white tile would look oldfashioned next to the granite counters). When he sent the estimate, he sent three different ones as an example of the costs for different levels of granite.
The counter installation went perfectly... it took two days (necessary for undermount sink to dry), started and ended on time, and the results looked great. The backsplashes did not go as well - there was a delay getting the marble (Jose let me know ahead of time and asked if I wanted to reschedule the counter install but I said no), it took a whole weekend, and they ran out of material so they had to order more, so the backsplashes weren't completely done until almost a week after the counters were done, which was ugly but not inconvenient. (The material shortage may have been partly my fault, I made them rip out lots of the little 2"x2" squares because the corners looked broken off when they cut it, but it's not really noticeable after they've been grouted).
So, to summarize the negative things:
- their pricing is average or slightly higher than other independents, not 1/4 or 40% that of other places (Jose said this himself when he came to do the estimates, he must have had some disappointed Yelp readers).
- their seams are not necessarily invisible... unless you get a Level 1 granite or solid black, that's impossible, the patterns won't match up. It's clear they take care to try to match things up, they did a nice job of trying to continue some red streaks across a seam boundary, but you do see a discontinuity in patterned granite. They did do a good job of minimizing seams - I only had one, which was necessary because the counter ran longer than a standard slab size.
- I was also initially unhappy about their cleanup after they put in the backsplashes... although everything looked clean when I wiped my hand across the counters it came up dusty. It turns out though that marble dust is just hard to clean, it took me four tries to get the counters clean myself. Their cleanup after the counter installation and the fireplace surround installation was very good.
All in all, they didn't live up to some of the unrealistic hype I saw in some of the other reviews, but they did a really good job, and they had a happy crew, so I recommend them highly.
Things I learned from this experience:
- The reason granite installers include sinks but not faucets in their estimates is that there are only so many sink variations, but a zillion types of faucets. I was initially surprised people didn't include (what I thought was a) $20 faucet until I went and looked at the variety (and prices!). It's worthwhile spending time looking for the perfect faucet, I found a pulldown faucet whose arch and single lever echoed the neck and wings of the swan in the stained glass above my fireplace.
- If you install marble or travertine backsplashes you may end up having to replace a lot of electrical stuff. I ended up having to replace 4 sockets, 1 GFCI, 3 switches, and two motion detectors (and the wallplates for all of these) because they were pure white and stood out against the new polished marble. Also, marble (and probably travertine) is thicker than tile, so you'll probably need longer screws than come with the new wallplates (even the travertine wallplates).
- You may end up replacing your cooktop as well... I wasn't going to replace any appliances just because my sink went from white porcelain to stainless steel, but I had a plain white cooktop with burners that just looked bad against the new granite, so I had to replace it with one of those black smoothtop ones.
Good luck with your remodeling job! read more