These are my pics of my countertops placed Friday June 22, 2018. I cried looking at these seams. It looks so cheap. Fabricator explains that's the way it comes. I explained that I shouldn't be able to see the seams so clearly. It looks so unprofessional. They ended up taking them back to their warehouse. In hopes they say if it is quality control will try and fix it just to make it look better. Otherwise I will have to pay an additional fee for them to come out again to install. I just don't know what to do and if still looks the same. This is the first time I've replaced my counters in 24 years. I don't and can't live with it. looking at this for another 24 years. It looks so cheap and it really was not it's a lot of money to me. I hope fingers crossed that they will fix this problem. They never told me that there would be such seams. I thought the edges were done by a machine and it would be all one piece. I have read up on this and now understand there are seams. But now I do know that they should not look like this. If they are good fabricator you shouldn't be able to see them so clearly. I will find out next week what happens.

I like the busier one, but these are SUCH small samples. If there is one lesson I have learned, and cannot emphasize enough, is that you MUST GO SEE THE SLABS. Really. I know you have seen one of them, although even that marble may be entirely different if you go back to the granite yard and look at another slab of that same marble. You may find a slab of the busier one which isn't so busy over the entire slab, or a slab of the quieter one that may have large veins in it that aren't in the sample. So don't make a choice until you see several slabs of these marbles, and then just choose by which slab you like. BTW, don't forget to bring your cabinet samples and soapstone samples to the granite yard with you.

Every choice has pluses and minuses, in the end you have to choose which plus and which minus matters the most to you and/or which have an easy fix (like using a cutting board under the crockpot; at work we have an extra piece under the big coffeemaker). budget mattered a lot to me (and I hated formica) so, I ended up with a lesser expensive granite and am very happy, no sealing or extra work for the stone I chose. I had formica previously which looked like h#*! from the day I moved in and didn't get better (except that I could use bleach to remove stains) so those of you whose formica looks like new after 30 years must be taking appropriate care -- using cutting boards (mine had little cuts all over) and so forth -- where my previous owners did not. But, I read that formica now is much better quality than what was installed 30 or 40 years ago. I looked at Burled Beach and liked it. It looked a warm sand-ish color on my samples in my house, but I saw a demo kitchen of it at a big box store and it was a warm greenish tone (I still liked it) under their fluorescent lights. You always have to ability to STOP and make changes unless the cabinets are all already made. If he is just now starting it might not be too late -- call him now! PS do you have an IKEA near to you? Most counter materials are less expensive there.

Here are a some pics and my dilemma. Keep in mind this is my old fridge...new one comes today! Here is how we ended up with this: I have never had an enclosed fridge so didn't think about the peninsula dying into panels or how deep panels were going to be. I "semi" designed the new footprint and took it to Lowe's where the KD took over. (yes---I know......) Bought Schuler plywood with maple fronts cabinets. Although the kitchen designer had the model number of the fridge we were buying, which is a full-size, she designed the kitchen with 24" deep panels. She knew I was trying to have the look of an enclosed fridge. Being that I've never had an enclosed fridge, it was something I just didn't think of until the install started. Evidently she put a counter-depth in the design program because the elevation sketches she gave me showed an enclosed fridge. "Luckily" the panels actually came in wrong and were cut at only 23" for some strange reason and the installer caught it right away when looking over everything. Otherwise he probably would have installed them and I would be stuck. So called Lowe's to reorder the panels and somehow in all this it suddenly dawned on me that a full size fridge was going to be deeper and require deeper panels. I thought "no problem! Yay I can order them at 30!" By this time the KD had quit her job due to the pandemic. The other KD didn't know what was going on so we called in the Schuler rep. She was the one who immediately told me that those 30" panels would be sticking out in front of the peninsula. She asked if we could move the peninsula forward since the other side is an overhang for seating, but we couldn't since it would bottleneck the entrance into the kitchen down to under 36" and getting rid of an existing bottleneck was one of the reasons for the re-design to start with. So we had a dilemma. We cannot go down to a counter depth fridge which was the other option. What I decided was to split the difference and order 27" refrigerator panels. The fridge without doors is 29.5" so I will have about 3" of the side of the fridge sticking out which I don't like, but while I want my kitchen to look beautiful, I value the functionality too. The old fridge that you see in the pic sticks out a total of 32" The new fridge will stick out 34 with doors but without handles (4.5" of that is doors that would stick out anyway) Here's the really complicated part....we will be installing decorative panels on the end of the fridge as we have them on all the cabinets. This is how you enter the kitchen and I don't want that big blank space there next to the peninsula. The panels should be installed with just 1/4" reveal. I posted a photo below of how the panels look that are already installed on the side of the pantry that adjoins to a 17" high window seat. Luckily those face the opposite way from the fridge panels so you will never see both at the same time. I also posted photos of us holding up panels on the side of the fridge (they are NOT the right size panels...we have to order those still---we just used these to look at the right edge as to how wide to make the panels.) Also keep in mind we can remove the quartz backsplash piece if that would look better. That was not originally planned...the panels were going to sit directly on top of the countertop. So do we order the panels with just the 1/4" reveal to match the panels in the rest of the kitchen? Or, as the Schuler rep recommended, order the panels so they are the same width with the countertop, leaving about 1 3/4" reveal on the right side, but then your eye follows the countertop all the way up. I asked the countertop templater guy if I should just lengthen the overhang on the kitchen side of the peninsula to 2.5" to bring it out to within 1/4" of the fridge panel but he said no....I'm now thinking I should have insisted on it. Especially since we have full overlay cabinets that already make the overlay look very small since the 1.5" planned overhang is measured from the box, not the front of the drawers. Note how small the overhang looks to the drawers. And then of course, they had templated for a 1.5" overhang and I only got 1.25" UGH! Every quarter inch there would have made the reveal on the side of the fridge less. Suggestions appreciated! I'm hoping that I will eventually make peace in my mind with this issue and won't notice it but it is driving me crazy right now. I think of all the things that screwed up just because of this one error by the KD that I didn't catch and I am beating myself up for it!