Great question! Thanks for asking. We talk about bypassing nurseries because the products they sell cost about 6x more than the same products we can get at a feed store. That is not because of your mark up, it is because we can find the raw ingredients of organic fertilizer at feed stores for 6x less after the feed store retail mark up. The difference is the organic fertilizer brands do product testing and create big websites and do a lot of marketing and have their products registered as a fertilizer in the state. None of that is done done for an unmarked bag of rabbit pellets. One of the reasons people historically avoided organic gardening was the high cost of the products. Compost leads the way on super-expensive products at an application cost of about $35/1,000 square feet. Shipping can double that price. Organic fertilizers have ingredients like alfalfa meal, soybean meal, ordinary corn meal, corn gluten meal (unlicensed CGM), cottonseed meal, linseed meal, feather meal, and/or canola seed meal (aka rapeseed meal). Those products are the bulk of the ingredients of all the labeled organic fertilizers. Along with expensive compost, expensive, branded organic fertilizers are keeping the newbies out of the organic market. By us sending them to the feed store to get supplies, literally hundreds of thousands of new organic gardeners have been created. How do I know? I wrote the Organic Lawn Care FAQ (found in the GardenWeb Organic Gardening Forum FAQs). That FAQ has been posted to many other online forums some of which have download counters. Back in 2005 it had been downloaded more than 75,000 times from the forums that count. Downloads continue and organic forums are growing like wild fire. On one forum that started a couple years ago, all the moderators are organic. The forum is general but all the mods happen to be organic. They all started with the FAQ and took off from there. So you can really go a long way to build a great business if you handle it the way we have found to be so successful. And in fact, one of the most successful organic proponents is in your general area. He is the poster child for organics. His KBG lawn remains green almost all year long with only a couple of weeks in December when it might brown some. These generic materials are animal feed and usually come with insects in them. With that in mind you don't want to stock them out in the store with the rest of the products. At the feed store you pay up front and drive around to pick up. If you play your cards right, there is a market for organic materials in the winter, too. The materials do not decompose as fast as in the summer, but there is a benefit to the soil to apply during the winter. I would suggest you carry the name brand fertilizers along with the brown bag ingredients and let the customers decided which to use. You might even print the FAQ and have copies available (free, of course, because I expected it to be freely available when I wrote it). I have seen a move in the forums where, once people see the results with feed store rabbit pellets, they to go back to a nursery and buy Espoma and other name brands, so there is that market, too. Additionally I've seen feed stores carrying 20% acidity vinegar by the gallon and molasses by the gallon. I get molasses at a farm CO-OP at wholesale prices if I bring my own container. That would be a welcome benefit at your store. You can get the molasses wholesale in 55-gallon drums and mark it up to resell by the pound to people who bring their own containers and still save your customers money. Other popular items are liquid seaweed (Neptune's Harvest is hydrolyzed (better), not emulsified) and greensand. One item that should be more popular than it is is brewer's yeast. It is called "rocket fuel" by one local reseller. I've never used it because of the price, but they've been selling it for 30 years, so there must be something to it. One thing you have to be very careful of in selling unbranded materials is in the claims you make for them. Sure as I'm typing this, your competitors and the people from Espoma will be all over your store waiting for you to claim that alfalfa is a lawn fertilizer. I can make that claim because I'm not selling it, but you can't. The way they get around that is by telling customers how it works in someone else's yard. The sales person is trained to say, "Some of our customers use alfalfa pellets in their yard and tell us the grass gets dark green." Did I call it a fertilizer? Did I make a claim it was a fertilizer? Did I make a personal experience claim? It is a technicality, but it seems to work. Dark green grass is the effect we want. How much do we care about the biology or chemistry that makes it happen? Alfalfa pellets seems to make dark green grass happen...for some of our customers (don't say ALL because some will find ways to misuse it). As a reseller you are not allowed to sell products as fertilizer that are not labeled for that purpose. The statement I made above is not an authoritative claim. "Some (unnamed) customers tell us (right or wrong, truth or fiction) that alfalfa pellets make their grass dark green (dark by who's standards?)." Market them as animal feed. You might be able to call them "soil amendments." Check around locally. And now that I think about it, putting my FAQ out on the counter might be construed as making fertilizer claims about corn meal, so maybe that would not be wise.

I think that is universal, as I know of no state that is willing to spend millions of dollars a year to test thousands of unique appliances in order to come up with their own rules. (I prefer to use the relevant example) ;D " What I'm understanding is that installation instructions are designed to meet building code." - yes, but many of the installation instructions seem to be worded by lawyers, and designed to be decieving to the average consumer. "Listing" is what happens after the independent testing laboratory makes sure the product's clearances label and installation instructions meet the ANSI standards and put that "UL sticker" (label) on it. - the whole code process works together with the "listed and labeled" requirement and ANSI safety standards. . [https://www.houzz.com/discussions/tile-backsplash-wont-meet-building-code-dsvw-vd~3992018?n=57[(https://www.houzz.com/discussions/tile-backsplash-wont-meet-building-code-dsvw-vd~3992018?n=57) .

[set soapbox mode on] Okay now I'm taking it personally. You can check all the sources you want, but I can assure you it becomes baffling almost immediately, especially if you spend much time reading peer reviewed university journal articles. What we have here in this and other forums is hundreds if not thousands of peers reviewing what we do and reviewing it in much less baffling terms. The text that I copy and paste is my own, so I don't need to site sources. When I came to this forum I was doing almost everything wrong. I was convinced I was fairly correct because I attended a land grant university and took classes covering this stuff. After a few heated forum battles I tried some of the things these illiterates were writing. Lo and behold they worked for me. After that I looked back at other suggestions my "opponents" were making. Some seemed counterintuitive, so I looked into the science soil biology. From that and what I had learned of human physiology in grad school, I created the Organic Lawn Care FAQ, available on the GW Organic Gardening FAQ section. I posted that FAQ on several sites. Those sites with download counters registered well over 75,000 downloads each. Nobody in the forums seemed to be arguing against my work, so I guess you could call that peer reviewed. My lawn owner peers - perhaps not your ivory tower peers. As a result of that document I was asked to moderate three new organic lawn care forums at other e-locations. Again I am calling this a reasonable review of the concepts I set forth. I consider the Organic Lawn Care FAQ the first easy to read concept document on organics since J.I Rodale popularized it in the 1950s. His compost approach was nice until we got the technology to study DNA in the soil. With testing done in the 90s and 2000s we learned that compost wasn't a be-all, end-all magic bullet. Compost is little more than a collection of microbes and microbe carcasses. It works great as a mulch. But the benefit to organics comes from feeding real food to the soil microbes. Then you'll have to read Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Biology Primer to learn how that food gets processed into plant food. While that document is not trivial reading, it is readable to us unwashed. What I try to provide is best practices for low hassle lawn care. These practices have been reviewed in other lawn forums and tuned up over the years. Yes there are ways to make it harder and more expensive, but I don't want to work that hard myself. I even copy and paste some of the things I have written, because that has a lower hassle factor than recreating it again and again. Every now and then something new happens in home owner lawn care. Two examples that come to mind are leveling and sprigging. Several years ago Dave Proud brought us an illustrated and detailed account of how he leveled his bermuda grass lawn. Before that we never discussed leveling to get rid of a bumpy surface. It was an epiphany. The lights went on and we dug into that. I got him to join another forum for lawn nuts, and the process has been used a lot. That general topic fed into the question of why lawns get bumpy. Rototilling was discussed among homeowners and professionals. Rototilling seems to be the root cause, or at least one root cause. Another fairly recent homeowner discovers is sprigging a few dollars worth of very expensive bermuda stolons onto bare soil. This process came to us from R. Simon in Australia. It seems like he developed the process and made it work. On this topic I do not know if anyone else has sprigged successfully. I spend more time in this forum where there are more beginners than I do in the other forum, so they could be sprigging all the time over there. My point is that if and when someone has a better idea about lawn care, I'm going to bring it to the forums and discuss it. Generally those ideas do not come from peer reviewed journals out of the universities. But if, for example, you want peer reviewed evidence that shampoo will soften your soil, search the journals for "Cascade Plus, golf course, core aeration." Without the quotes of course. You'll find plenty of articles on the use of a concentrated surfactant called Cascade Plus being used to replace core aeration on golf courses. Shampoo is also a concentrated surfactant. I did not invent the use of shampoo, but when I tried it, and it worked like magic for me, I was all over it. Please go ahead and look at all the sources you want. Come back with your ideas and we can talk about them. I have reasons for not top dressing, not core aerating, not rototilling, and all the other oddball stuff I suggest. You don't have to believe them or agree. You are free to present your thoughts, but what irks me is when people refuse to spend $0.50 on shampoo but they will spend $75 to rent a back breaking machine that will not work nearly as well. ...all because they read a peer reviewed journal about core aerating. [set soapbox off]

it's not horrible. but I agree, the rough edge should have been done better to blend w/the other piece. I also think they could have done a better job matching up the pieces. 100% they should have informed you where they were going to cut and how the ends would look against one another. Most reputable fabricators will show the client and have them sign off before they cut, just for this reason. you have a lot going in there from what I can see. a very busy backsplash, red/brown cabinets and a blue/gray wall color? and bright white outlets. you can buy colored outlets/plates that would blend in w/the tile. or get the wood one and paint it yourself to match the tile color. when shown against everything else you have happening in that space, the seaming really isn't that noticeable.