Hi Lisa: Welcome! I don't have AB honed but I do have Jet Mist honed. The fabricator applied a sealer to it, but that seemed to be reacting with our hard water (got water rings) and I wanted more protection (and a deeper color) so I applied an enhancer over the sealer. If I had to do it over again, however, I would have skipped the sealer and gone directly to the enhancer. (I applied the enhancer to a remnant piece of our Jet Mist and it looked great and didn't stain, despite my experiments on it with olive oil, lemon juice, etc.) So my advice, as long as you like the deeper color, is to use an enhancer. The one I used is DuPont Stone Tech Enhancer Pro. It was very easy to apply (I put on two coats) and is not greasy or blotchy (as long as you follow the directions, especially the part about wiping it very well after the drying period). Hope this helps! Remnant piece with and without enhancer:

Help! I had honed AB installed yesterday. There is etching in one area, the place where they put tape on either side of the seam to keep the glue from harming the countertop has now left marks where the tape was and I can't rub it off (not residue from the tape, the area where the tape was is now two darker black strips running down either side of the seam!), there are stains already on the granite when they brought the pieces in that they said it was just moisture and it would go away (it hasn't after 24 hours) and the silicone they used to caulk the backsplash is so shiny that it looks almost white against the honed black. It looks awful. Any suggestions, please? I started to seal it, but stopped thinking I might be making it worse. Thank you for reading!

Thanks for the encouragement. I've now gone from dreaming about counter tops to losing sleep. Last night I tossed and turned. I'm just about ready to cry from all of this. Who knew it could be so stressful to pick one island and a countertop. I must just want a kitchen I don't have. The KD of this fancy place said that my surrounding cabinets wouldn't do a honed dark granite justice. That I couldn't pull it off. I know what she means - I really don't like my cabinets at all. But they are decent 42" birch interior, maple stained cabinets made well by a local Amish man. And given the how expensive it would be to do all new everything, we really can't replace everything. So I thought/hoped that by rearranging the kitchen (the cooktop used to be on the island) and by making a really beautiful piece of cabinetry for the island, we could pull off a nicer look and more closely approximate the kitchens I love. The KD's thought was to paint the island white - Linen White by BM and then use a chocolate truffle Caesarstone on everything. I don't mind the white island, because I would love a white kitchen. But the surface of the quartz is what I don't really like. It is a great color, just too speckled looking for my taste. I asked her about using marble and honed granite, etc. and she was pretty positive it wouldn't look good. Mind you, what I have been thinking about for days and days and for hours, took her about 10 seconds to decide. If I trust her - and her kitchen store is the nicest I have ever seen - then I should seriously consider the white island and finding one color counter top. Staceyneil - I absolutely think you hit the nail on the head with the door fronts being the wrong style for the honed look. My husband actually built our last kitchen cabinets, so he is more than capable of building new fronts. I guess it is a matter of the time. We are putting in all new floors ourselves and just moved in a few months ago. But if and when we had the energy, that would make all the difference in the world and certainly would be more cost effective. The cabinet you described is exactly the look we had in our last house. It was natural cherry cabinets with a very simple shaker type door and flat drawer fronts, all full overlay. I miss our house back in NY so much (and my whole family for that matter) but we had to move to PA for a job... And so here we are, and here I am thinking/agonizing about counter tops and spending way too much time on GW! :)

Hope we didn’t make a mistake. Stone Source did not have any soaostone we liked. so we went with a honed black granite. I have seen somewhere that citrus might etch them which I was hoping to avoid with soapstone. They are honed on one side and leathered on the other. So, I might have to go with the leathered. I still chose Danby marble for my perimeter cabinets. I think I would like the honed granite better aesthetically to go with honed marble. Any thoughts while I have time?