Well, it happened! We did it! Yesterday the rocks "magically" moved to my house. Last week I went to my friends house and Farmer Ed used his loader to pull the rocks from the woodsline. I was worried because I thought he had a farm tractor, but it was a heavy duty loader and it treated the boulders like they were bowling balls. Once he got them all out of the hedgerow, there were a few more than I thought - 26! Probably 5 or 6 BIG (bathtub sized) 12 Medium (32 inch TV) and the rest Small (microwave sized). Seeing how easily he handled these rocks was very reassuring, so I made arrangements for the loader, truck driver, and unloader for the following week. The weather was terrible here all week. We had a tremendous windstorm with gusts up to 65 mph that uprooted a few of my newly planted trees. Then we had a very heavy rainstorm. Then a spell of our first "winter weather" - 40 degrees, crisp, biting wind. But Saturday dawned warm and sunny and still, a great day for moving rocks. Farmer Ed and his son both arrived with loaders. For some of the big rocks, one loader would push the boulders into the other loader. You could see that the smaller one would not have been able to lift the heaviest of the rocks. They were quite skilled at what they did, I took my four year old son to watch and he loved it. Mike the truck driver was great. Acted as if he did this every week. He said he had hauled some very unusual things in his time, and raw boulders was another on the list. He took longer to tie everything down than it took to load. He was very thorough and professional. Made a phone call as we were leaving so Dick the backhoe driver would be there when we arrived. Dick and Brian were waiting when we arrived. Just immediately drove up in the backhoe and started tugging them off and they rolled away. It was slow and steady work, but happily was done without incident. Just like that! Wow! Now we still have the work of moving them from behind the barn to be placed in the backyard, but that seems a lot more doable than having them magically move 30 miles south. With the fall rain we've had the ground is rather soft for heavy equipment. We'll move them next summer. So watch for another post then asking how to move them into position. But for now I am quite happy! I'm sure enquiring minds want to know, how much did it all cost? Things improved from my initial conservative estimates. The $150/hour was for a quarry loader, which we didn't need because the farmer's loader was one of those BIGGGG ones. Farmer Ed did me a huge favor and did all the loading for $150 plus various baked goods and bottles of wine. Really he was being nice to my friend who owns// owned the rocks. Truck driver Mike was very professional and very reasonable, I thought, for $250 since it took his entire afternoon. Dick would only take $100 for his work since "it didn't take him very long" and he lives just around the corner. So total transport cost was $500 for 25 very nice sized granite rocks. $500 isn't a small sum of money, we've just blown the landscape budget for 2006, but at $20 rock it seems fantastic to me when I think how much work was done. I'm still working on getting a very nice something for my friend too, who was so fabulously generous with her stones. What a long winded post, as you can tell, I'm excited. Here's some photos, I've never done photos before so we'll see how they work.

Generally, the short dimension is between 5 and 6' and the long one is between 8 and 10'. The range depends on the type of stone and the quarry so you will have a wider choice if you can use 5 x 8 than if your job needs 6 x 10. The stone we really liked usually comes in smaller slabs - the first ones we saw were 4.5' by 5.5'. The slabs one other store in our area that had the variety were 5.5' by 8'. They checked their other yards and found 5' 4" by 10' 4" slabs in one about 120 miles away. They moved the lot to the local yard so that we could see them. That's what we bought - it allowed us to have only one seam in our L. We were told that they almost never see slabs that large in our stone.

Haha, you folks are so awesome! You've really helped me to see the light and accept the perfection of imperfection. So, I called my granite guy yesterday after the unanimous results here and told him to keep the little jerk and that I'd learn to love it like only a father could. And to answer your question may_flowers, I seriously considered an apron sink at one point, but given the hackeration that would have to happen to my existing cabinetry and the added cost of the sink itself, I decided to go with a 60/40 Kraus SS from Amazon (again, thanks to GardenWeb recommendations). I got a wicked awesome 4th of July sale price on it too, as I was going to purchase on a Sunday night at $360, but woke up the next morning and got it for around $270! So anyways, my Samsung SS appliances arrived yesterday and the granite will be installed early next week. I'll post pics when the granite gets here so you all can see how everything turned out! Thanks again!

Well, I spoke with the builder this am. This fellow is a former site-superivisor who did such a thorough job (thus taking him a little longer to finish his jobs) that he was essentially demoted to being a guy who does the warranty repair work. Anyhow....he gave me the scoop. The 2x10 floor joists are not being dried as well as they should be at the mill. He is seeing this in a lot of houses and he has even called the supplier and voiced his concern. He said probably that along with the fact that we still don't have our humidifier hooked up (which was supposed to be done by now!) accelerated the rate of the wood drying and shrinking. He said he is very surprised about the granite separating. He said he is glad it didn't break...uh, yeah, me too! So, we are going to hopefully get the humidifier hooked up right away, and maybe it will slow it down a little bit. He thinks once we get into the coldest part of the season and the heat is really running a lot it will get it all the way dried out and then we can fix the stone. I'm off to call the granite people and see if there is anything I should do to the seam temporarily to prevent stuff from running down it! Thanks again for all the help. Bee