Your home is your biggest investment; doing everything you can to get the biggest dollar return on it makes sense and installing granite is a great place to start. The housing market has never been so competitive, homeowners are thinking of ways to make smart improvements that will yield the highest return on their investment. The main part of your home that buyers pay attention to are kitchens and bathrooms. Most real estate professionals will tell you that there is a big “Wow” factor when home buyers walk into a house and see granite. As well as a big practical reason for using this stone there is also the ‘bling, bling’ factor, like owning a Rolex watch, and all this increases the value of your home and makes it far more desirable to buyers.
It is amazing to think that you could have a rich, beautiful piece of granite that was quarried in Brazil and up to 700 million years old in your home! Most of the world’s granite comes from Brazil. Granite is magma that comes from volcanic rock; it is blasted out of quarries and extracted in large blocks that look like a giant loaf of bread, and then sliced like bread by a multimillion dollar diamond bit machine into slabs. These slabs are then shipped to the U.S. ......................................................................................
It is important to take the same slabs from the same block so that you do not have any problems matching seams. If you were to take slab #1 and slab #14 out of different blocks then you may have trouble matching a seam. M & R Granite has become known for high quality work and that means having the least amount of seams and having a beautiful piece of stone that shows it’s natural beauty. Granite comes in many different colors and of course no piece is the same as the next. Granite actually has the second highest hardness rating after diamond!
Granite has unrivaled durability as it is so dense, it’s scratch and heat resistant and unlike laminate it will not deteriorate in wet conditions. When water gets into a seam it separates the material, at this point the counter top is useless.
The true beauty of this rock lies in the craftsmen that finish and polish the stone. According to Bankrate.com the average payback: 98.5 percent of cost on kitchen remodels.
I want you all to know about my personal experience with Pat Rhodes and Alfredo Joanilho owners of M & R Granite. I have a historic house which I love but it had the ugliest and smallest master bathroom in the world. It was straight out of “That 70’s Show” with its avocado floor and harvest gold countertop, truly psychedelic man! I put up with it for years until I finally couldn’t stand it anymore decided to do a total remodel of the bathroom. This is when I met Pat from M & R Granite. This company was wonderful, with my busy schedule I did not have time to hang around for workers that don’t show up or deal with any unnecessary problems. I remember Pat coming over to look at my bathroom cabinets and going over all the possible options. I went out to the yard and looked through aisle after aisle of granite slabs. I returned to the yard several times before making a final decision. Pat asked me if I wanted matching window sills which was something I had not thought about. He told me that if I needed tile inserts they could make them and give them to the tile company. Pat showed me all the finished edge options and when it was all decided Pat’s partner, Alfredo came out - on time and on the right day. It seemed as if he was in the house for a few minutes and then he was done. No mess, just a perfect job, it was like hitting the EASY button; I just wish everything in life could be that simple.I was curious to find out more about this company and asked Pat how the company started. “I was in the kitchen cabinet business for years and had a cabinet job in Haile Plantation. I had to sub the granite work out and that was when I met Alfredo. He did the job flawlessly, he was on time, on schedule, no delays, no punch-out work, no call backs to correct anything. Alfredo moved to West Palm Beach so I used to pay him extra to come to Gainesville just to do my granite work.” |
