The Central Valley Homeowner’s Guide to Choosing Countertop

A kitchen counter job can cost a few thousands of dollars, a major investment in a house. The right counter not only provides your family years, or even decades of enjoyment, but also adds great value to your house. And it’s important to choose the right material, and the right fabricator/installer.

 

Price is always the number one priority in most people’s mind. We all want to get the best bang for the buck, but you need to watch out for the quality of the counter slabs, and the craftsmanship of the fabricators.

The quality of counter slabs to pay attention to:

 

  1. Color consistency from piece to piece. If pieces are not from the same batch, they can look slightly different. If the pieces you love happen to have different color/patterns, you can try to piece best matching pieces together, and put different colors away from each other;
  2. Thickness of the slabs. Certain manufacturers have higher tolerance of slab thickness, and if two pieces of different thickness are connected, the transition might look imperfect.
  3. Undulation of slabs. Some slabs might not be perfectly flat, and they have very small waves. You don’t feel it when it’s stand alone, but when 2 pieces connect, the waviness will create a not so smooth seam. And you can see the warping through window reflection on the surface. 

The quality of fabricators to pay attention to:

 

  1. Always choose a licensed contractor;
  2. Always choose a contractor with a physical office with regular business hours. Never choose one who works out of his truck, as you can’t find them if things go wrong;
  3. Always choose a fabricator/installer that does counter fabrication/installation full time, not a Jack of all trades. Counter fabrication/installation requires such a high level of skills that one needs constant practice to master. A jack of all trades won’t be able to perfect counter cutting and polishing to the best level.

Granite vs. Marble vs. Quartz vs. Quartzite FAQ

Marble was the first solid surface countertop material for a long time due to its relatively soft/easy to manufacture nature. Marble has stunning unmatched natural beauty hard to rival, yet its softness makes it a poor counter material: scratched and etched easily.

 

Granite is a much better counter material compared to marble, as it is a tough material to work with due to its hardness, and it was not until the latter part of last century that granite became a luxury countertop option. However, with the advent of mass scale of man-made diamond production, tools to cut and polish granite became very cheap, dramatically reducing the cost of granite fabrication, and the popularity of granite countertop exploded after the turn of the century.

 

Physically, granite has all the advantages that marble lacks: strength, shininess, and resistance to scratch and etching. Yet granite does not have the natural beauty of marble. Granite is formed by the cooling of molten magma, which lacks the clean background and movement streak patterns of marble, which was formed on the ocean floor.

 

Quartz is an engineered (man-made) counter to include the best of both marble and granite: beautiful marble colors and patterns, with toughness of granite. Quartz countertop material is made of 7% of epoxy resin and 93% of pure quartz crystals. It is just as scratch resistant as granite, and it is also stain resistant, which means you don’t need to provide any sealer to its surface. The drawback of quartz is that it is not UV resistant, and not suitable for outdoor use. Prolonged exposure to the direct Sun will cause some discoloration.

 

Theoretically quartz is not as heat resistant to natural stones such as marble, granite and quartzite, but modern quartz technology is so advanced that ordinary cooking heat such as oven baking pan and stove frying pan are within the heat tolerance of quartz.

 

Quartzite is a relative new counter material in the last decade. It is considered a premium product as it is rarer in nature and it is harder to manufacture than granite. It can have gorgeous patterns and is extremely scratch resistant, with the only drawback being its high price tag.

 

Generally speaking, currently both granite and quartz are popular choices of countertops, and the choice comes down to individual’s esthetic preferences. Marble is beautiful but fragile, Quartzite is gorgeous and tough, but pricy.