To answer your HD questions and concerns. First of all each HD has a manager that runs his/her store as they see fit. Therefore I can only speak for "our" store. Each associate is trained for their individual department. I work as a garden associate and we have 16 hours of horticulture certification and another 8 hours of nursery consultant certification. Yes, we do know the answers to your questions and more. Cashiers are just that and people that load stuff for you do not. Don't expect them to be knowledgeable about such things. Our Garden dept manager IS a master gardener. Our plants are NOT owned by HD and are brought in by vendors. Vendors WANT and LOVE a chance to put their plants on HD shelves to sell because they make more money by doing so in the hundreds of HD stores than they would selling themselves. Their merchandise is what we call pay by scan which means if it's not sold it is no loss to HD and if it is then the profit is shared. So of like consignment selling. This is just business folks, the way it is. Therefore HD cannot mark down plants that do not belong to them so don't ask for the half dead plants that are being thrown away. It's not our choice but the vendors choice to throw them out. Possible reasoning is it cost to much to them to ship them back, they could be weaker and have diseased. The HD as does the vendor does not want unhealthy plants on the shelves. It's not a good reflection on either. Our vendors DO MARK down some plants at their descretion. The vendors have people hired that come in and display their plants and put them out on the racks. They are called display merchandisers. HD for the summer has hired outside help to water plants. It is their only job. We tried having associates water and found that these plants in the South need watering twice a day and as big as our nursery is is a 8 hour job for one person which left our customers lacking on our attention. We do put our customers first. It is so important to us we have what is called the VOC. On your HD receipt you'll find a web link to go to that questions your service at our store. When our associates have made you happy and you tell us that, the associate receives an award. So, yes, we strive to put that smile on your face. While at times we may be understaffed please understand it's summer and over 100 degrees on days that we are trying to keep the nursery going, loading pave stones, pine straw and answer questions. HD has a great return policy on plants. We've taken back plants that have obviously been neglected by the customer with no questions and replaced those plants. I've watched people buy plants for centerpieces at parties only to return them for a refund when their party was over. It's easy to place blame when you don't understand the inner workings of a business and all that goes on. Most of the time we don't even have a say so on what plants come to us from our vendors. The vendors themselves send what they think will sell. If you have questions or concerns I'd be glad to answer any way that I can.

No engineered stone is approved for UV exposure. It’s not an industry secret at all. None can go outside. Period. If your professionals that you worked with had done their jobs, you’d be an educated consumer and know that it’s not an exclusion just for Cambria. Direct sun from standard new windows shouldn’t pass enough UV to damage your floors, furniture, or e-stone. Standard windows already come with UV blocking properties, so if yours are so old that they don’t have it, you’ve got other issues about UV exposure in your house. Old windows need UV blocking film installed to avoid degradation to all kinds of interior finishes. Not just your e-stone. If it’s a relatively new window, that’s a conversation that you need to have with your window manufacturer. It’s defective. This is Not on Cambria. Or Silestone. Or Pental. Or Zodiaq. Or any e-stone manufacturer. New windows shouldn’t have issues with transmitting enough UV to damage your home.. Poop happens. This isn’t on Cambria. Talk to your window manufacturer.

Yesterday a contractor that HD recommended from a list called "Red Beacon" finished our upstairs guest bathroom. They recommend Red Beacon when the job is too small for one of their in house subs. It looks terrible. What a mess. Then he charged me way more than his bid. I didn't like the guy, just a weird dude, so I just paid him and told him how disappointed I was with the way he did it as in the grout lines were to be zero grout line and they are all different sizes up to a quarter of an inch when we agreed on an eighth of an inch. Not to mention he didn't put the tiles all running in the same direction of flow meaning the tiles have a directional pattern on them in the form of veins running through the marble. The tiles vary greatly in shading and he put darker ones all in a row and lighter ones randomly when it would have looked better to disperse them throughout. He didn't even install a threshold and had told me he would cut the tile in small rectangular pieces to meet the door jam but he ran the tile all the way to the entry and just cut off the edges and butted it against a thin metal strip and filled it in with grout. The tile cut isn't cut evenly so it's all running down hill as far as the butt joint against a metal strip. It isn't a metal threshold strip it's just a thin metal strip. I reminded him that he said he was going to do a threshold and he said oh yeah I did say that I don't know why I didn't and just shrugged. I told him I didn't think it looked good and would he like that in his house? He said no. I said what do you think we should do about it and he said that well if you ever have any other work in the future I could fix it then. What? I wanted to say there will never be another time. I paid him the full amount because we were alone in the house and I just don't need to be feeling like someone would do something to me or even say something to me that was really awful and with no witnesses here, he really could do/say whatever he wanted. It was so awkward. His skill level was just not up to doing this very small bathroom. I am not sure where to go from here. I don't want him coming back here. I can't even make myself go up there and look at it closely. It took him 3 long days to do 36 square feet of tile plus the side of a 5 foot bathtub and there was no tear out except for taking up that amount of carpet. I think I could manage getting over what I paid him but it's the materials that I am agonizing over. It was all Carrera marble tile and side splash on the face of the tub and a new Kohler toilet. I am starting to hate HDepot and Lowe's. Something always goes wrong when I have dealt with them and I don't know why they recommend people that don't have skill levels to meet even basic requirements. I honestly feel I could have done as good of a job. He also used three more boxes of tile than he estimated which would have been nearly half again as much as the space. I realize that setting tile on the diagonal takes more but not that much. So he bought more tile and I had to pay for that too. I cleaned up the driveway myself and there was so much wasted tile out there including some he was cutting in circles to place over the open trap for the toilet that smells so bad while working which I totally get but I had mentioned just setting a full tile on top of it as we have done in the past with the master remodel not cutting a custom tile piece just for the amount of time the drain was going to be open. Each tile costs several dollars and I saw at least three of them discarded when I was cleaning up I guess he was practicing on, not counting the ones that were upstairs. What is going on Home Depot?

Thank you for the very many helpful comments so far. Since we've not gone down this road before, it's great to get an idea of other's experiences and what a reasonable starting point will be. I don't mind the couple of comments about our budget being insufficient: I am trying to determine what does or doesn't fit in that budget. So pushback is good. If too little fits in it, then maybe we need to table the project for a few months or year until we have some additional cash on the table. We have one quote, that is in line with the previous comment. The GC we talked to didn't seem phased by our budget (and we cited a smaller number back then, as we've saved more in the intervening months). However, when he drew up recommendations, the number *did* come in higher. The plumbing, electrical, and ceiling work were estimated at about 2500 each. The estimate for cabinets, counters, modifying the drywall, etc was about 21,500. So, $28,500 was the quote for all the essential stuff. This left me puzzling over the following problem: wait, save, and come back with more than $28,500 (the 10,000 mentioned would probably be ideal), or try to figure out if we could scale the concept back to bring that figure at least somewhat closer to budget. Our next step may be to play with the Ikea planner. Perhaps what I can do from there is check with one of the big boxes or else (this might be smarter) just get cabinet quotes from a vendor, and then pay one of the contractors who works our neighborhood and knows rowhouses to help us evaluate the cost of everything else. That way we'll know what we can aim at and how close we are. Thanks again, this is all very helpful.