Countertop Services in Austin, TX

Choosing a material

What actually separates quartz, granite, marble and quartzite

What separates these four materials is mechanical, not decorative. Engineered quartz is manufactured: about 93 percent crushed stone aggregate bound in roughly 7 percent polyester resin by weight, pressed under vacuum until the slab has virtually no porosity. The other three are quarried. Granite is intrusive igneous rock, 20 to 60 percent quartz by volume in an interlocking matrix with feldspar and mica. Quartzite is sandstone heated and squeezed until the grains and their old cement recrystallized into a single interlocking mosaic, at least 80 percent quartz. Marble is recrystallized limestone, so it is calcite, which drives nearly everything a marble owner must think about.

Hardness follows mineralogy, not price. Quartz sits at 7 on the Mohs scale, above window glass at 5.5 and ordinary steel at roughly 4 to 4.5, so quartz, granite and quartzite all shrug off a dropped knife and all three need diamond tooling or an abrasive waterjet to cut. Calcite sits at 3, so a marble worktop is softer than the pan you set on it. It scratches, and no sealer stops that.

Porosity is a separate axis, and the two get conflated. Engineered quartz is effectively non porous and never needs sealing. Granite takes a penetrating impregnator rather than a coating, at something like every five to ten years with modern products. Quartzite resists chemical weathering, which is the geological way of saying acid does not touch it. Marble is soft, porous and stains readily, and because calcite reacts with acid, lemon, wine and many bathroom cleaners etch the polish in the shape of the spill. An etch is not a stain, so wiping achieves nothing. Consumer Reports rates engineered quartz the most stain resistant common household surface, granite second.

What drives the price

What drives the price across every countertop service

There is no per square foot number on this page and there is not one on any page here. A figure published before anyone has measured your room is a guess, and a guess made to win a call is always low. What we can do is name every input, because they are the same inputs whichever service brought you here.

Area and layout set the floor, and the real driver is yield off the slab rather than square footage: two straight runs cut cleanly out of one slab waste less than a galley with two returns and an island. Material grade moves it hard, and on natural stone grade is about supply rather than quality: a common domestic granite and a rare imported slab sit far apart. Strong directional veining then has to be laid out so the pattern meets correctly at each seam, which cuts the usable area of every slab.

Thickness moves material and labor at once: the thicker material is dearer per slab and heavier to handle, while the thinner one often needs a built up or mitered edge to read thick. Edge profile is tooling and passes, an eased edge being a single pass where an ogee or a mitered waterfall is several plus hand polishing. Cutouts are counted by kind, not just by number, since an undermount opening is polished to a finished visible edge and needs real support underneath.

Then the practical items, which are the ones missing from most comparison quotes: removal and disposal of the old surface, cabinets needing leveling first, and the plumbing reconnection, where a corroded shutoff valve that will not seat again is the most common surprise. Check whether tear out, haul away and the plumbing sit inside any quote you compare us with.