Fabrication and Install of the Quartzite Countertops

Welcome back to the kitchen renovation! Super excited for this episode, because we’re going to be doing countertops this time. The work on the countertops has been going on in the background this whole time. We picked out the countertop stone a long time ago, before we picked any of the finishes for the whole kitchen. 

We went stone shopping in December of 2021, and the warehouse was 6-10 rows all the way down with different finishes of stone. We looked at granite, quartz, quartzite, soapstone, marble, and probably some more that I can’t think of right now. We gravitated toward quartzite because we didn’t like the granite and the man-made quartz was just too predictable and boring. When we got to the quartzite section, it just really spoke to us. We designed the kitchen so that the stone is the focal point and everything else fades to the background, so we wanted something that was really visually interesting, and the quartzite did that for us. It was really cool to see the veining and fracture lines in the stone, which creates this visual image of the stone being built up over hundreds of millions of years. 

One of the hardest parts of the whole process was picking the quartzite we wanted to go with, because it was hard to visualize how it would look in the finished space. We ended up settling on this one, which is a stone called Celeste, which had a lot more going on and more color.  

So once I got the island in place, I reached out to the stone fabricators and let them know that I was ready for countertops. A week later, they came out to measure and make a digital map of the entire kitchen.

A week later, those measurements were compiled into a shop drawing. This one shows the kitchen area with all of the pieces, overhangs, and seams that are going to be in the countertops. They also made a drawing of the pantry, which will be getting countertops as well.

The coolest part is that they photograph the slabs and chop up the images into the exact sections they’ve laid out these parts from, so you get a very good visual representation of what the countertops will look like when they’re cut and installed. 

The stone fabricators invited me to come watch the breakdown of the stone slabs, which I’m really excited to see. The first slab is set up on the CNC, starting to get milled. There are going to be two CNC machines processing the stone. The first one I’ll call the breakdown machine, and the other is the finishing machine. To start with, the CNC is going around with the milling cutter, making any curved cuts or cutting relief areas so teh saw won’t overcut into an adjacent part. At this stage, they’re making all of the countertop pieces a bit oversized as the finishing machine will trim them down to their final size later.

Now with the saw cutter on there, the machine will go around and make all of the perimeter cuts. Because of the hardness of quartzite, they’re making the cuts in three passes. The entire process of breaking down the slab took three hours, with the milling step taking about half that time. The guys in the shop were extremely welcoming and friendly and were telling me all about the nuance of fabricating stone. They told me that if they were processing this out of any other material, it would’ve been broken down and off the machine in about an hour. I knew quartzite was a harder material, but that stat really puts that into perspective. 

I was curious how much water they went through every single day, since this machine is spraying water everywhere, the other machine we’ll see in a bit is spraying water, and there are a handful of guys hand polishing with water spraying onto their work. They didn’t really know how much water they used because they have a recirculation system that filters out all the sediment and returns clean water back to those machines.

They have a laser that casts an outline onto the bed of the machine, giving the operator an outline of where the parts need to be. The parts are sitting on vacuum pods that can be placed anywhere on the bed, but the laser will tell them where to place those as well. Now this machine, with its plethora of tools, will mill the stone to final dimension, add the edge profile, polish the edge, and make a relief cut on the bottom so that they all appear to be the same thickness. I didn’t consider that about stone slabs: they can vary in thickness within the same slab or from slab to slab.

This is Brad Norris, one of the owners at NVR Surfaces, which is a surfaces company. They do natural stone, quartz, porcelain, granites, just about anything and everything in the hard surface products. He also has a bunch of tile setters in the field doing surfacing that way as well. He was giving me all the details about quartzite.

Quartzites are the latest product out there as far as natural stone, it’s becoming very popular. That has a lot to do with its veined marble look, but they’ll wear like iron, you won’t scratch them. Here is a gorgeous piece of Celeste Blue quartzite with lots of cross-veining, which Mother Nature spent millions of years to produce. This is a very consistent piece of quartzite, it’s pretty visually balanced. The other slab has some variation in the coloring which was very cool, so we used the prettiest piece from that slab for the island. 

If you look closer at this stone, you can see where Mother Nature shifted the stone, resulting in some cracks in the mountain that water seeped through, altering it with the minerals which causes the colors to shift. 

It’s a week later, and they are here to install the countertops! Here is the first piece. It feels real now! 

I hadn’t scribed the sink yet, because I wasn’t positive that it wouldn’t need to be adjusted because it has some twist in it. Luckily, the installers felt like there was an acceptable level of ebb and flow to it, so that it didn’t need to be changed.

There’s some variance in thickness between slabs and even across a single slab, which you can see here, so this will have to be shimmed up a little bit to make it flush.

So here is the final look of all of the tops. It looks so different in here now, it’s absolutely incredible! 

A few weeks later, I had finished setting the hutch cabinets in the kitchen and the pantry, so they were able to measure the backsplashes, and now those can be installed too. 

I’ve been admiring all of this stone now that it’s installed, and as I look at the island, I feel like I should get a bucket of water and toss it on here like it’s a slab of wood. It has all of this crazy rippling and figure throughout it that reminds me of compression figure in a piece of wood. 

We are really happy with our decision to go with this particular stone! I think it does a lot for the space, and it’s exactly what we wanted: something with a lot of movement, a lot of boldness, and a lot of character. It just makes me happy every single time I walk in here and I swear, every single time I look at the stone, I see some new thing that I haven’t seen before. 

A huge thank you to Brad and everyone at NVR Surfaces for allowing me to be a part of the whole fabrication experience. That is going to do it for this one! Thank you as always for joining, I greatly appreciate it! If you have any questions or comments on the home renovation, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking.