Occasionally, when you walk into a natural stone showroom and choose a type of granite you’d like to use for your newer kitchen countertop, the slab delivered to your home ready-to-install may be slightly different than you thought. they were getting. While the granite you’ve received will still be a beautiful stone and similar to what’s found in the showroom, many homeowners demand to know the reasons behind the difference.
Since granite is a stone that undergoes a considerable amount of processing before being made into the countertops we know and love, there are actually a number of factors at play that could cause it to look slightly different than any sample in the living room. exposition:
- Granite is found in large blocks and is cut into slabs which are then shipped for processing. There are actually several different saws that can be used to cut the stone, and each one can create a slightly different surface.
- These granite slabs are further cut (into squares) in manufacturing plants with the use of a powerful press or a special circular saw. Like the previous point, this can create slightly different surfaces.
- The granite is then put through a milling process, which uses pads and abrasives to smooth the surface of the stone. You can remove some of the rough, marbling lines left behind by the previous step, but some blemishes have been known to creep.
- Polished granite is occasionally cut and chiseled into the shape desired by the homeowner, which can slightly disturb the surface of the stone and cause its own blemishes.
So why does the granite on display in the showroom differ slightly from the granite delivered to your home? Well, the most likely reason is that the stone in the showroom was taken from a different phase of the manufacturing process than your finished product. Often the fragments of the second point are sent to vendors to use as samples in their showrooms, so they have not yet been polished or chiseled.
Do these small differences primarily matter? For most people, no. They understand that the granite they saw in the showroom had not yet been polished and covered with a protective sealer. For other people, these differences are very important, since they based everything else on the particular sample they saw in the showroom.
