Granite template layout - Nothing is easy

Wednesday our granite guy came to template our granite countertops.  Today we went to pick out which parts of the slab we wanted for our countertops.

It sounded like it was going to be really easy... and fun.  It ended up feeling more like a root canal.

Seam hell
We get there and discovered that we do not like where there machinist has determined our seam needs to go.  Our countertop is longer than the slab of granite so we needed a seam somewhere.  It is pretty common for other places to put seams at the sink so they are not as visible.  However, the place we went to suggested that we did not do this because they said it looks great in the beginning but deteriorates over time and doesn't look as good later.  After spending as much as we did on these countertops  I was not going to do anything to jeopardize their longevity!.  They can't put a seam on a dishwasher due to lack of support.  This means they needed to put it about a foot to the right of our sink to ensure adequate support.  A lousy place if you ask me.  I can't blame them though... it isn't like they designed our kitchen.

Once we got through that we got to layout our template on the granite.  Our granite has a lot of inconsistency to it.  That is one of the reasons I loved it.  However, this inconsistency became a royal pain in the ass when we started having to try and match the two pieces where the seams were going to be.

Layout hell
We started off laying out where our island was going to be.  That was the easy part.  When we tried laying out where the countertop seams were going to be we could only find one place on the slab where the color differences wouldn't be as noticeable.  Unfortunately this was my least favorite part of the slab.  In other words I hated it!  I was about to cry.  After going $2000 over budget for these slabs I was going to end up with countertops I wasn't really crazy about.

The Solution
After going back and forth for about 30 minutes I finally had an idea.  When we purchased our slabs we got to pick which 2 slabs we wanted.  They had 3 of the yellow river slabs.  We had picked based on the pattern, not the consistency between the slabs.   I asked if they still had the 3rd slab.  They did!!!!!!!!!!!!!  The 3rd slab matched our initial slab (with the island) much better.  Within 10 minutes of seeing the new slab we had the countertops laid out and I was happy!  They get installed on June 7th!  :-)