For our new house master I'm using a fantastic honed marble look-alike porcelain tile, 16x16, and I'll tell you why. Last house we did an extensive master bath remodel with three different kinds of white marble. It was amazing and the complements were off the charts. I loved how it looked but I *hated* how it lived. I had water etching all over the place, even after sealing three times. Honed will help with that I think, but I believe even honed will etch. Honed also isn't as stain resistant, so you have to think about that, too. And it was indeed slick and we had to have rugs everywhere. Honed might help with that. But the tile we're using is an amazing replication of a honed marble, and I'm picky (won't even consider the marble-look solid surface counters because they're not realistic). Or you could find a granite look-alike tile. As I'm out there looking for granite for the kitchen I keep seeing all this gorgeous marble and lots of different opinions from granite suppliers and fabricators on using it in a kitchen, mostly negative. It tempts me every time. I absolutely love the stuff. And I'll never use it for a practical application again.

When we were searching for counter top for our hall bath,we found a Ocean Blue remnant slab, but it was too short. During the searching for a bigger slab, we found similar slabs in every stone yard in our area. Later we decided to use quartzite instead to avoid the cost of matching stripes and for easier maintenance. Not sure if you want to take another trip to Dallas - Did you see a posting in the Kitchen forum about Dallas - For worth stone yards? Here is a link that might be useful: Dallas-Fort Worth stone yards ??? This post was edited by azmom on Fri, Jun 14, 13 at 9:31

Box stores charge for every single thing you listed. No freebies anywhere. Coved backsplash instead of set on backsplash adds a LOT of expense to a quote. $30-$40 a foot. Free edges are very limited. Maybe 1-2. Tearout is $5-$10 extra per square foot depending on if it's laminate or tile. Corian integrated sinks are $400 to $750, while the charge for other material undermount sinks runs $300+. They may tell you one thing on the phone, or even in person because they don't often have a lot of people trained in how to give an estimate. Then when the fabricator comes to template, there are all of those extra charges that they ''forgot'' to add at the store, like plumbing reconnects or haul off of the old counters. Then you have to pay them if you want your counters because that's in the fine print that the original price was only an estimate. The fabricators determine the actual square footage and upcharges and you won't know exactly what you're paying until that happens. Just be prepared for the additional cot that it REALLY costs.

debrak, I like the way they do it here with the fabricator and slab yard being separate. (I'm in Northern California.) It meant that we could select material from any of the yards in our area and we could select a fabricator with a good recommendation. We went to all of the yards. One yard wouldn't give prices, all the rest would and we decided not to deal with the one that wouldn't. Our fabricator said we could use any yard but also gave us a list of the ones they usually worked with. Laurensmom, when we would go to a yard, we would give them our fabricator's name and the yard would tell us the price for slabs we were interested in. I'm under the impression that the price to a given fabricator may depend on how much business that fabricator does with them. Our fabricator doesn't mark-up the slabs (though I don't know whether he gets any kick-back from the slab yard). He just charges enough for fabrication to cover what he wants from the job. After had the slabs held, we could either pay the slab yard directly or pay him and he would buy them. In either case, he would check the slabs to see that they didn't have any flaw that would make them unsuitable. I'm not sure who was responsible for the slabs between the slab yard and the fabricator. It would have been either the yard or fabricator depending on who did the transport - they worked that out between them. The fabricator was responsible for them from then until they were installed. If they dropped it or made a mistake in fabrication, it would be their responsibility to replace them. I remember our fabricator saying that they were going need to be extra careful with ours because the slabs were so expensive (and it would have been very difficult to find a match if the slabs from our lot were gone). We saw slabs of an unusual blue stone at one yard that we really liked but they were very small so our 4 by 8 foot island would have needed a seam. We checked all the other yards and found one other had the same stone. They had lovely slabs big enough for our island though the L would have needed two seams. We would have bought them but they checked inventory at their other stores and found a lot with bigger slabs. So they held the first slabs we chose while the bigger ones were transported to the local yard. We came and looked at the big slabs and liked them so bought those instead. Blue is a less common color and which makes most blue stones expensive, but I thought blue pearl (or was it blue eyes) was an exception - not the cheapest but not exotic pricing. Our fabricator required that all the cabinets were in place to come out and template and all sinks and accessories on site. They took the sinks with them (undermount). For the install, our plumber was there as well as us and the fabricator's folks so that we could all agree on positioning of the holes for sink accessories.