I bet you thought I was kidding about DIY-mining my own marble countertops.
Paul was away for work early in spring. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does I worry about two things:
1. previously-discussed proliferation of ax murderers outside the house.
2. that something really good will show up on Craigslist and my retrieval team will be unavailable.
Which is exactly what happened.
And it turns out that sometimes it is better if your retrieval team is not available. Because sometimes the retrieval team gets confused and thinks that their role is actually the roadblock-to-happiness team.
I called Paul and said – GOOD NEWS! Marble! Giant fancy edge! The guy will put it in the car for me! I’m going this afternoon!
Paul said – have you actually thought this through?
I said – nope. BUT YOU ARE NOT HERE TO STOP ME.
#winning
The marble originally lined a foyer; sort of like wainscoting in a small vestibule. The guy had three sections, each one is 2’ x 4’.
What am I going to do with it? I don’t know.
Why are you on Paul’s team?
When I got there, it was EVEN BETTER than I expected. EXCEPT for the 50,000 ways it is going to be impossible to work with.
When I saw the marble, half of me was like – awesome.
The other half was like – Paul is not going to be too happy with this.
First, the slabs are slightly different thicknesses. And the back of it sort of resembles the surface of the moon– unfinished.
Second, the edge that would be out-facing/flush with (my special, imaginary non-cabinet) cabinetry is rough. REALLY rough.
Now. Normally my part of the acquisition would be finished… but because Paul was away, I was tasked with the get-this-out-of-the-car finale.
I had planned to ask one of my neighbors to help me. And Paul made me promise that I would not drive ANYWHERE until it was unloaded.
Paul has this weird thing about safety. And also about not leaving loose ends lying about. How we ended up together is a total mystery considering that my entire personality consists only of loose ends… you cannot even get near me without tripping.
Plus, do you know what I’m really good at? Doing only part of a project: the fun part.
I am SO great at the enthusiasm part— the part where you will move heaven and earth to ACQUIRE GIANT FANCY THINGS. But after that, I am tired.
So after I got it, I just left the marble in the car.
I never asked the neighbor. I kept putting it off. And forgetting. And forgetting. And forgetting. Until I’d go to get in the car and be like– oh, right… this marble is STILL HERE.
So it was no surprise that I ended up with a pile of stone still in the car the same afternoon Paul was supposed to come home.
I cannot overstate how incredulous he will be to realize that I drove around for a week with roughly 600 pounds of unsecured marble in the car.
Whenever I go to pick something up without him, he tells me 50 times – don’t forget to tie it down. If you get in an accident, you do not want to be speared in the back of the head with vintage patio furniture/plant stands/the hand truck… USE THE STRAPS. Safety first. Boy Scout code of conduct. Blah, blah, blah.
For whatever reason, it does not motivate me to actually take steps to prevent being bashed in the head. I just drive around IMAGINING my head bashed in.
Why I choose to go around, mentally dissecting worst-case scenarios, rather than taking the 10 minutes to avoid them in the first place, I cannot say.
Anyway. Paul was coming home, I had three giant slabs of marble violating the car-safety-code-of-conduct, and not one of my neighbors was home. So I decided to do it myself.
I was pretty sure my chances of breaking one, (or all) were high. Marble is notoriously fragile during transport. But it tells you something about Paul’s ongoing frustration with my inability to complete tasks that I found it more appealing to possibly trash my find than incur an interrogation.
So, I figured I would video it… When you are an blogger, this is how you spend your Sunday: videoing yourself wrestling a 200 pound rectangle.
Was that the most interesting thing you have ever seen? No… Was it slightly more interesting than whatever you are supposed to be doing at work right now? Probably.
June 11, 2014 @ 11:34 pm
Too funny! Love the video! I can so relate to the part about doing the “fun” parts of the project and then being exhausted afterwards. I usually need a nap.
June 12, 2014 @ 12:59 am
Went to my condo association meeting tonight where a few of the women caused uncomfortable drama. I can’t sleep so I checked out the blogs and yours is just what I needed. I enjoy your sense of humor and thank you for it.
June 12, 2014 @ 1:08 am
VEB, you are my heroine! Now that I have stopped laughing, I’m convinced that I would like to be you when I grow up (whenever that is…) Fantastic job moving the marble, and at least you wore goggles, gloves and used the hand truck. Can’t wait to see what wonderful thing you do with the marble.
June 12, 2014 @ 9:55 am
You rock! I would have done the same thing. In fact, I live alone (must find a paul!) and so I unload all my craigslist finds myself. I bought this fabulous crusty old buffet a few months back and took advantage of my brother in law being over storing stuff in my barn and asked him to help me carry it to the house. Dang that was heavy. How on earth did I unload that all by myself? Craigslist desperation comes with incredible strength!
June 12, 2014 @ 10:07 am
The silent movies are back! Loved it. I found myself talking to the screen as they did in the old days.
June 12, 2014 @ 10:56 am
First: I have to comment (after looking @ the location where you met this !guy! you didn’t know and actually went behind a RED drape to see the Suspiciously cheap 3 pieces of ancient marble.) Your Axe Murderer radar should have been sending OOGA OOGAS all over the place. Those guys always use red drapes, it complements the color of the copious amounts of BLOOD! Second: I’m wondering -since this stuff was upright and used against a wall if Paul couldn’t build some sort of framework for a base for the Urn. You would have to find a pretty piece of Marble or stone as the top and fill in the back with another find-or what about 2 pieces of Marble and 2 piece of scrap granite, with the 3rd cut down for a top . I see the Urn resting on some sort of elevation rather than on the ground. But I’m not creative enough to come up with something appropriately beautiful. You most definitely are.
June 12, 2014 @ 11:20 am
Great Video! You made my day. Can’t wait to see what you are going to create or do with that marble.
June 12, 2014 @ 11:44 am
Another great post! You don’t always need muscle around to help move those big items. I can’t tell you how many awkward and heavy things I’ve moved in my lifetime using creativity and ingenuity, not because I necessarily wanted to – but because I didn’t have a Paul handy. The upside is that I didn’t have to listen to the dialogue that often accompanies the muscle. 🙂
June 12, 2014 @ 1:32 pm
You crack me up! I had visions of the marble slab falling on you as you stood it up on the hand truck. Glad to see you and the marble are both still in one piece.
June 12, 2014 @ 3:30 pm
Darn – I expected it to be more like this:
http://youtu.be/2tOsj5KV8kI
June 12, 2014 @ 3:34 pm
When I was a kid, my mom wouldn’t even let us keep a kleenex box in the car for fear of it becoming a projectile. I can’t even imagine what she’d say about a slab of marble.
June 12, 2014 @ 11:54 pm
Grinding wheel, and shims for the cabinet boxes. Done. I definitely have a JV version of this crazy (i.e., my kitchen includes a piece of Craigslist marble from the nineteen-teens, which was just $35, but had no fancy edge – but I made it into a tabletop. My actual counters are boring old countertop), but I was able to cut down both marble and granite to size, and some day I will even get around to grinding the edges. And I do not remotely have Paul’s skill level.
Also, happily, standard countertop depth is 24″-25″, and lower cabinets come a little less than 24″ deep if you look around. (If you use salvage, there’s even more options!) By the way, Paul will know this, but you don’t actually want your countertops flush with the lower cabinets – at least, not if they might have water on them. I ignored this rule (I did know about it, but it didn’t seem important) when making my sink cabinet, and now I have to build it a new edge because the water runoff is warping the door. (Of course, the positive side of building your own cabinet box and countertop – and door, actually – is that you can rebuild them if necessary.)
Also – check out Naomi’s latest kitchen (featured in Lonny) on designmanifest.com/blog. The upper cabinets have a really cool custom profile – I prefer salvage myself, but you can get interesting detail on contemporary cabinets (and she’s in Philly, so you could use the same cabinetmaker). Tell Paul. It will make salvaged cabinetry seem so affordable!
I’m also interested in how you’re going to approach the seams-in-the-marble issue. I have some totally brilliant ideas along the lines of making a virtue of a necessity (my approach to construction imperfections is to add as much trim as possible) – separate them with either black marble or some nice stained walnut. Ideally more salvage! But of course, given your carefully-crafted posting schedule, you are obviously just teasing us – even now you are enjoying the beautiful new-old kitchen that you will slowly reveal over the next few months.
June 13, 2014 @ 3:17 pm
You are welcome to use my motto “It is often easier to get forgiveness than permission.” I have an antique Hoover-type cabinet that I found in an antique shop I frequented. I just knew I could not leave the place without buying that piece. It has a beautiful arched top instead of the usual squared cabinet.
The shop offered a layaway plan with 1/3 down, 1/3 at 30 days, and the remainder at 60 days. I figured I could manage this and then find a way to get it home. Well, since I was a frequent shopper there, the sweet little old lady that owned the shop would tell me I didn’t have to pay as much each month (probably because she enjoyed my visits). It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford to pay on her normal terms, I took her up on her offer and drug the payments out because I started worrying about the consequences when this awesome piece showed up in our home!
So… months pass… and this story is the big joke with some of my co-workers with them making up poems and stories about the things I was going to have to do to make up for my sneakiness! Oh, to back up a bit, my husband (now ex for obvious reasons) never would let me have keys to our truck. It was an old truck that was nothing fancy but ran well, but he didn’t want me to drive it because he was a control freak. He wanted me to drive it when I was able to take time off work to pack and move us to a new home, but after that, I never had keys to it again. So, he was out of town and I figured this was the perfect time to get that new cabinet into the house! I borrowed a truck from a friend and handled all of the loading/unloading/assembling by myself. Problem was, we had a rear entry garage and the only place for this piece was on the wall that you saw when you first entered our back door. Oh well, I might as well get it over with immediately… So I sat in the living room waiting to hear the garage door open. One of my girlfriends from work called me to see how it was going and she stayed on the phone with me while I waited. Then I reported that I heard the garage door raising so he was there. Then I heard him pull in and the car door closed. She was a goofball and she told me “when he sees it and reacts, the code word is ‘girl’!” Okay, got it! He opens the back door, walks up to the piece, and hesitates in front of it just looking at it. And I said into my phone “GIRRRRRRRLLLLL!!!!!” She starts laughing on her end and is asking me questions but I couldn’t reply. He still hadn’t even said anything yet. Finally, he asked “How’d this get here?” (He was more concerned that I might have driven his stupid old truck than how I paid for it!) I told him I borrowed a truck from a friend. He never asked me how much I paid for it or where I got it until years later when we were divorcing and it was our last day in the house before we parted ways. He really surprised me when he questioned how much I had paid for it! LOL! And I could honestly say I couldn’t even remember by then.
June 13, 2014 @ 10:54 pm
Being from Indiana, I obviously have to correct your name for the cabinet. The style you have is a HOOSIER cabinet.
June 14, 2014 @ 11:43 am
OMG! You are so right and either I just blatantly mistyped it, or I correctly typed it and my computer changed it thinking I had misspelled it. Actually my cabinet is not a Hoosier but one similar to that style and I still love it as much as the day I first laid eyes on it.
June 13, 2014 @ 8:26 pm
Just found your blog and read several posts. You made me laugh out loud and feel so NORMAL. Not many bloggers do either. Keep up the good work!
June 14, 2014 @ 10:43 am
Wanted to let you know I stumbled across your blog this morning and love it! And I gave it a mention in this morning’s post http://chestercountyramblings.com/2014/06/14/cool-gardening-app/ and I suggested your blog to my friend Melinda who is also restoring a crazy cool Victorian in the Philadelphia area called Stonetower Mansion https://www.facebook.com/pages/Stonetower-Mansion/124451961063691 – next time she goes barn picking with me for random acts of house stuff you should meet up with us!!!
Anyway thanks and have a great weekend!
June 17, 2014 @ 2:20 am
*applause* Encore! Encore! *applause*
June 17, 2014 @ 7:22 am
I drove around with a dishwasher in my van for a week because it was on sale, but there was no spot in the house for it. We had to demolish a set of cabinets and add plumbing just to use it. I believe you may be the only DIYer crazier than me. I really mean that as a compliment! 🙂
June 20, 2014 @ 10:30 pm
James concern would have been me venturing out to some strangers house in some dark room to get said craigslist gold. But then he wouldn’t have understood the awesome blog entry it would have made for. I get it. Hang on I gotta go play catch up on the aftermath of this…
July 1, 2014 @ 12:30 am
This is my first time visiting your blog and all I can say is LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!! I feel like I am reading a story of my own life (except that I am in far too rural of an area to be lucky enough to find marble on craigslist!) Your ambition is inspiring and your commentary on your experiences has me laughing out loud!
July 8, 2014 @ 12:07 am
what do you mean, it has no use?? of course it has use. it can be used as an island counter. it can be used as a side counter. it can be used….give me minute and i’ll think of something else.
after all, i’m sure there are some stone masons around there that would smooth the rough edges and the back side would be facing the bottom of the counter (which would be where the glue or adhesive would be placed.)
they could also be used as the counter for a 2nd bathroom sink or the counter for an entry way table (again after the stone mason has smoothed it out and ‘cleaned’ it up for you.)
i am just very glad that you got all three of them because at first i was like “did she really just take ONLY ONE of them…OMG was she out of her mind!!!!!!!!” imagine my relief when i read that you HAD the presence of mind to take them all. bless you, i was able to breath a sigh of relief.