Shopping for tile and granite

This week our builder Dwight took us to pick our granite,tile and back splash. We went close to downtown Atlanta to the Daltile slabyard.There we encountered a showroom filled with tile and back splash and a huge warehouse with rows and rows of granite,marble and onyx slabs used for home decorating. We went unprepared for all the choices and quickly figured out it was going to be a task to pick. After wandering aimlessly while Dwight and the Daltile rep made suggestions we narrowed it down to 4 choices. Two of these were brown in color and really nice.The other two was darker in color .Granite is graded on levels and then a high or low grading within these levels.The higher the level the higher the cost. Our contract called for a level 2 high but the two we liked were a high level 3.That translates into double the price of the original estimate for granite.We thought about it for a minute then the reality of already being over budget and remembering that im really cheap kicked in and we walked over and picked Verde Butterfly http://www.daltilestone.com/series.cfm?c=2&s=1&cf=16

Its a dark greenish black with embedded silver spots.Im sure that's not a correct description since its a mans point of view but that's sure what it looks like. Its amazing that all this stuff was just cut out of the earth and polished.It looks too incredible to just come out of the ground.

 

After that ,we went to the showroom and chose the back splash and floor tiles.Im not sure they had names so we took pictures which I posted here.The backsplash will be a light beige color with a band thru it embedded with colored glass squares.The floor tile looked beige too. Sorry, I don't do colors very well so that's as much as I can describe it. On the way home we stopped at Lowe's to look at prep sinks and faucets .While there, we saw a fantastic deal on a Maytag fridge that was being clearenced.It just so happened we had a 10% off coupon which got the price down even lower than our builder could buy even with his discount. We bought it on the spot and left happy we had made a great deal.