The Day of Granite and Old Friends

Cherie had her college reunion this past Saturday.  Her *mumblemumblemumble* reunion.  Ahem.  That one.  You know.  The reunion where people walk around and try to pretend that they are still young and beer-gut free because they haven’t quite given in to being full-fledged adults.  (Us included: M: Don’t you think that everyone here looks a lot older than us? C: Um, honey, this is what we look like. M: No way!)  The reunion was a surprisingly good time, and we especially appreciated all the people who pretended they found the housebuilding thing to be interesting, instead of just nutty.  Thanks, guys.

Anyway, we learned the week before that Freshwater Stone  was having their annual clearance sale that very day.  This is the sale when they clear out all of the scrap and remnants that have been collecting in their yard for the last year.  It’s a great time for people like us that are flexible in what they want and too broke to hire the professionals themselves.  (But if we had the money, we would hire these fine folks.  We highly recommend checking out their galleries.  They do beautiful work.) As luck would have it, we had to drive right by the sale to get to the reunion.

We’ve been planning on using granite as the woodstove surround and Michael had been half-heartedly collecting various scrap pieces from some friendly local masons to use on the walls.  We weren’t sure what we were going to put underneath the stove but were considering slate to match the entryway.  Granite pieces seemed possibly unstable, but the mismatched granite/slate idea wasn’t quite right either.  Either way it was worth a stop in to the sale.

Here’s just a small sample of what we saw:

Fields and fields of granite, the vast majority of it from local Maine quarries.  It was pretty amazing.  Or overwhelming.  It was possibly very overwhelming.

First we started picking through their big scrap pile, looking for good pieces for the walls–small pieces that were flat on one side for easy adhesion but rough on the other for interest.  We weren’t picky about color, figuring that as long as it was local and natural, the color would work itself out.  And it pretty much did.  After we loaded up the truck we wandered around to see what else was out there, and that was when we hit the goldmine: countertop remnants.  The perfect solution for under the stove.  A chunk of granite countertop is exactly what we needed: flat, even, fairly thin.  A short investigation of the options with the tape measure and we found our perfect piece: a 50 inch by 50 inch chunk of pinkish granite.

Of course, getting it in the truck meant that we had to unload all of the rock that we’d already piled in, but Cherie didn’t mind doing that while Michael hunted down the guys with the heavy machinery.

This is Cherie using her happy face to show how she didn’t mind at all.  Really.

By the end of it all, we were late for the reunion but had scored a bargain-priced $200 worth of fine Maine granite for the woodstove surround.  And Cherie got to scare former classmates with her enthusiasm for rocks.

What’s not to love?