We are in California and bought our slate countertops from a company in Maine that I heard about on this forum (Sheldon Slate) and had them installed by a local stoneworks co. The kitchen was completed in Spring 2008 - and I just love them! They are a soft greenish grey with some black flecks, honed. I hated busy shiny granite. I can't tell you how many people have complemented them. They do not need to be sealed - they absorb nothing. They will scratch, but rubbing with a wet sponge brings it back to normal. Love, love love the look with our shaker style cherry cabinets. Thought about soapstone but didn't want to go so dark and also heard they were more porous and needed sealing.

For granite yards in central jersey - 1) there's OHM in Monroe - indoors which may help when trying to see what it will look like inside. You need an appointment so call ahead. 2) Also in the same area, try European in Jamesburg. I almost got my granite from them - I like them because they are really picky and honest about their slabs. If it's not a good slab, they'll tell you. 3) Cosmic stone in New Brunswick. They had a large selection and some really nice slabs but not in the stone I wanted. 4) Ankur in Jamesburg or Monroe (you can google their website.) I didn't get there because they were closed when I needed to find a slab, but several people here got great slabs there at good prices. 5) MSI in Edison. I ended up getting my granite there at the last minute. They were ok, but not as helpful as I'd have liked. The didn't want to move slabs around without a lot of persistence, even when there was clearly a different lot in the back. For fabricators, I used Natural Stone and granite in N. Brunswick. They were fine - reasonably priced and fast. But I don't know if I'd use them a more complex job. In my case, I didn't need seams because of the layout. I almost went with Stone Surfaces of Central NJ in New Brunswick. I heard good things about them and they have a great rating with BBB. They were pricier though. If I were doing it over again, I think I'd go with Benchmark for fabricating. They have offices in Lakewood and in north jersey somewhere (can't remember.) You can e-mail them and they will give you a quote based on your layout. They have a decent showroom and work with many of the large granite yards. I've never heard a bad story about them. They use laser templating and seem to do a very good job with seams, matching etc. Their pricing was about the same as stone surfaces. good luck, and have fun!

When we were shopping for Steel Gray granite, different distributors varied from $3300 to $4200 for our 58 sqft of counter. No special edges, but cutout charges on sink, slide-in range, and peninsula 12" radius corner all varied; as well as "free sink", "free edge profile upgrade" offers on top of whatever the base price was. Our final choice installer was about $3600 after tax, or $62/sf, though the nominal square foot charge was $49.

I thought I'd update on what we did - we did end up going with the installer I found with the positive yahoo reviews. The sink cutouts and the single seam that they had to do look good, and they did basically manage to do the work on our timeline (a blizzard delayed everything in the city by a day, and the slabs they got from Zodiaq had some serious flaws that made them shatter, so they had to return them and replace them with some Caesarstone slabs instead, but even working around these issues, they managed to get the job done quickly). The only possibly quibble is that there are uneven gaps a bit at the far back of the countertop between the countertop and the wall, but the walls are really not straight at all, so I'm not sure that I can fault the installers for this (are they supposed to template the wavy back walls somehow? - I also didn't clearly say that we weren't intending to put in a backsplash, so perhaps this is my fault in not communicating clearly enough). So while we weren't intending to put in a backsplash, we are doing that now to address this issue, but since it is not too expensive or complicated to do this and it should fix the issue, I'm ok with that. I did end up joining Angie's list in the end, but I found it totally overwhelming and difficult to navigate - there were hundreds of firms listed under countertops in the NYC area, but none of the ones I had already considered or had recommended to me were listed, they almost all seemed to have the same ratings, and most of them were not specifically fabricators - they seemed to include a lot of general kitchen supply places (like Home Depot, for example), so I gave up. Maybe if I had had more time, I could have figured out how to use those listings more effectively, but in the end I just didn't feel up to prolonged weeding through, and I felt pretty comfortable talking to the firm we ended up going with (and figured that the positive yahoo reviews had to mean they were at least of a certain basic standard). Thanks again for all the advice and feedback - I really appreciate it during this complicated process that can be so overwhelming for someone who has never renovated before!