A New Stone Selection

After much deliberation (perhaps too much), we've selected a stone. Not without drama of course, but I think we can check this one off the list. As mentioned in a post a couple weeks ago, we had to reselect because our original selection was no longer available. Actually it was completely discontinued.

Our builder gave us a deadline of last Friday. So, we carved out some time and visited 4 different masonry showrooms. Out of that, we found two that were acceptable. One was another stone vaneer from a local stone maker, Cascade Stone (Gray Cloud). The other was an interesting natural stone from RocPro (Autumn Horizon) that sits in between man-made and typical natural stone.

Here's the original selection, the gray cloud and unfortunately, I can't get a thumbnail of the RocPro




We asked our builder for pricing. Without going into the details, I wasn't terribly satisfied with the pricing info we got and found myself talking directly to the masonry places to understand the pricing difference between what they told me directly and what they sold to the mason.

The natural stone was more and would mean an increase to what we had already budgeted for stone. But, our mason didn't seem to be getting a discount on this, where as he was on other stuff. Anyway, we made the selection to go with the real stuff from Roc Pro. We just felt like it worked best with all our other aesthetic choices (wood colors, siding, etc). So, we made the call.

But no. As soon as I sent the email on Tuesday giving the high sign, I got an immediate call from our builder asking if we really wanted to spend the extra $$$ for the stone. Besides just being a considerate guy, he had just found out what our sewer problem was going to cost us. It wasn't cheap. So, we agreed to sleep on it.

We did and we're still going with the natural stone. We just don't want to compromise on an important visual component of the house. Especially something that you can't just re-do in a few years time.

So, on we go. Maybe we can shave some money off in lighting or just cancel that professional landscape help we'd been considering.