Further to my review of May 28, 2012, SGT contacted me after my post and suggested 2 options to fix the gap under the counter: add a build-up for a fee or get a quote from their cabinetry contact to cover the gap with a wood strip. We opted for the build-up and it was installed approx. a month later. The installers took great care in making sure it fit properly and, as seen in the additional photos, the end result looks much better.
A slight crack had also started to appear between the seam of the 2 granite slabs that did not originally line up completely flush. When the installers came back to add the build-up they were able to fill it with more sealant which helped but it definitely is not as tight as the other seam on the left side of our sink. Hopefully the crack will not open up again.
May 28, 2012
We looked around at a few companies but settled on Select Granite Tops due to their outstanding reviews. The sales service was good, the scheduling was on time and we do like the piece of granite we chose. However, the reason we aren't satisfied with our countertop is due to the new set of issues that arose post-installation.
Select Granite Tops mainly provides 3 cm stones and promotes it due to the fact that it is a stronger than the typical 2 cm stone and also because no seam is required to create the thicker lip a 2 cm stone needs to hide the plywood support below. What we didn't realize is that the lip is quite important to hide other things besides plywood. We went with the 3 cm stone which sits right on top of our counters and now have a very visible 1 in. gap between the top of our cupboards and our granite countertop. To make it worse, the gap is white melamine and therefore an eyesore. We now have to look into ways to hide this gap. This might have been something we should have realized when they took off our countertop for templating but because the kitchen looked so foreign to us w/out the counterop on it, we didn't clue in that if the granite simply sat on top of our existing counter there would be no lip to hide this white gap. If the templating staff had pointed this out to me, at that time we could have still considered paying more for a lip. Unfortunately we didn't see it until the installers came and the countertop was in.
The other issue we need to remedy post-installation is that when the installers came to put our granite on, they realized that our breakfast bar area was lower than our sink area which meant that the 2 slabs of granite did not meet up at the seam. They had to put bits of wood below the breakfast bar granite to lift it up so it would be flush with the sink area granite and now we have another 1 in. gap below the breakfast bar where we can actually see into the top of our dishwasher. I asked the installers if they had ever come across other kitchens where the granite slabs didn't line up and they said they had which makes me think that the templating staff should probably also do a vertical measurement in addition to the countertop surface measurements. This way, the installers would not have had to come up with a quick fix on the spot and we could have tried to find a better solution than the one they had which left us with a see-through gap.
All in all, it's not that we were not pleased with the countertop itself but more so that we felt Select Granite Tops could have helped us avoid these issues. This is the first time we have changed our countertops and had we been more experienced, maybe we could have forseen these issues but we were mainly relying on the experience of SGT. So although we have our new granite countertop, we also have a glaring gap running all the way around our kitchen which really mars the whole thing for us. Definitely not what we were expecting.
In hindsight we realize that we probably should have gone with the standard 2 cm stone with the built-up lip because it would have mirrored our old countertop best.
