Learning From My Mistakes

That means analyzing why a mistake occurred, and correcting the behavior or circumstances behind it. Part of this is process is paying attention to the mistakes of others so you can learn the lesson without paying the cost. If your intuition raises red flags before you make an error, you’ve saved your company money.
In that spirit, I’d like to offer a list of my biggest mistakes as a fabricator, templater and installer. I paid the price for these, but you can learn the lessons for free.
• Always use a guide while drilling holes on a jobsite. Early in my career, I had a bit ‘walk’ over the granite when starting a hole, scratching a series of half moons in the surface. Even with the escutcheon plate on most faucets covering 2”- 2 1/2”, a little slip of the drill bit can go a long way in ruining a perfectly good sink run.
The worst part about this type of error is that by the time you’re drilling the holes, the job is almost done. It’s no time give yourself another hour of on-site surface polishing or, worse yet, having to pop-apart seams and remove the piece you just junked.
Invest in a set of professional drill guides or create your own out of wood or heavy-duty plastic. Just use something!
• Always have a stable work surface to modify pieces at a jobsite. If you use heavy-duty sawhorses, make sure the tops are relatively level and in the same plane before you set a piece on them. I broke a sink piece one time by setting it on out-of-plane sawhorses. Not only did I ruin everyone’s schedule; my company had to buy another slab to complete the job.
At a jobsite, a cement driveway is often the flattest, most-stable surface. If you have to modify a large piece, put down a couple of 2X4s on the drive and use them as your workbench. If you’re sawing, take great care not to saw into the driveway.
For adapting smaller pieces and cutting backsplash, I bring along a collapsible, wheeled cart with a flat working surface (the Salesmaker Model 290 – www.salesmakercarts.com – is a great model). It’s stable, and I can also haul my install tools into the house.
If the piece is delicate or on the expensive end, take it back to the shop for modifications. This may be a huge inconvenience, but it’s certainly less of a pain than remaking a finished piece.
• Always have enough manpower. Never underestimate how much effort it’s going to take to get a piece in place. I had an island ruined because it was simply too heavy for two of us to install.
At the jobsite, the guy carrying the other side of the island  had to set it down on a brick-door threshold he couldn’t clear. It chipped deeply on the surface and was ruined. That piece alone drained all of the profit, and then some, out of the job. It would have been more-cost-effective to bring along an extra guy.
Lifting a piece onto the cabinets can be quite precarious as well. I broke a sink run once because it was too heavy for me to clear the cabinet top. I bumped the face frame with the piece and snapped the sink cutout in half.
Know your lifting limits and don’t test them. Have an extra guy (or two, or six) follow in another vehicle, and have them leave after the pieces are in place. The extra expense is well worth it.
• Don’t let yourself get distracted. There’s no situation riper for error than a scatterbrained guy trying to work with numbers. I cut an expensive backsplash wrong once because I was annoyed at the carpenter trying to convert me to his particular religious bent.
When I’m installing at a jobsite, I will often leave on my earmuffs so I can concentrate without talking to the other contractors. I think it’s important to socialize with the guys, but I try to do this after attending to all the details. I’m quite the talker myself; if I lose my concentration I do dumb things, like putting sinks in backwards and drilling holes that are unevenly spaced.
This is true of templating as well, especially on remodels when a curious homeowner is present. Several times I’ve been distracted and forgotten to get a particular measurement. Driving back to a jobsite for one number is never cost-effective.
• Be consistent when measuring. I cut a cooktop opening wrong once because I wrote down the outside dimension of the cooktop instead of the cutout. I was going to look up the cooktop spec and change the numbers before production, but it slipped my mind and the wrong numbers got through. From that day on, I never wrote down a cutout measurement for a cooktop that wasn’t exact.
The same is true for cabinet measurements; if your system is to measure the cabinets and then mark down what you need to add for overhang, do that every time. If you only write down finished piece dimensions, never write down a cabinet size. Mixing the two can only lead to confusion.
Backsplash height falls into the same category. I always measure the full height I need and then subtract the stone thickness after I measure the slab.
Make sure everybody on your crew is consistent. Whatever measuring method you use, make sure everyone is on the same page with it and they actually do it.
• Be realistic with your pieces. I once broke an enormous L piece in half trying to install it. Even with four guys underneath, we couldn’t lift it onto the cabinet. It ended up tipping back toward us and snapping at the sink. I also had an island break into pieces after the templater decided the entire cooktop could be cut out prior to installation.
Both of the pieces were theoretically possible, but impossible to install. Seams are our friends. I know some companies won’t even turn the corner without a seam. I won’t go nearly that far, but I won’t take chances either. The risks are much greater than the rewards, because people often fail to notice seams once the pieces are installed.
Unless a cooktop piece is a slam-dunk, don’t do the entire cutout prior to installation. Containing a little mess is a much-better option than remaking a broken piece.
• Know how countertop materials interact. I once had a circular butcher block set into a granite island expand and blow out the corners of the granite that contained it. The homeowner returned from summer vacation to find two chunks of stone on her floor. Her island was replaced, with the wood pushed out past the maximum diameter point and a bigger expansion joint around it.
• Always make sure you’re cutting the right material. I once had to replace a peninsula piece because it had a small inclusion in it. The homeowner had tagged inclusion-free slabs from a different supplier and was not happy to see I’d gotten her stone from somewhere else. I brought in the slabs from my own supplier because it was more-convenient and the delivery charge was cheaper, but in the end the company paid big time.
I also had to remake an entire kitchen after a salesperson brought in slabs from one warehouse that were called the same thing at another. The granites looked nothing alike, even though they had the same name. We arrived at the jobsite ready to install, only to have the customer reject the whole kitchen.
Know where your customers went to look at material and get the slabs they tagged. Every one of my customers has to pick out their own stone, no exceptions. If there’s a particular area they want to highlight, have them tape the templates onto the slabs and mark them.
I had one customer who wanted a particular inclusion to appear in her kitchen, but the salesperson forgot to tell the fabricators. They cut around it, seeing it as a flaw. She ended up getting a deep discount on her project.
Take these examples to heart and learn from them, as we did. By analyzing mistakes and setting up systems to prevent their reoccurrence, you’re giving yourself a fighting chance to succeed. In an increasingly competitive industry like ours, a mistake is a gift to the competition.
Jason Nottestad, a 12-year stone industry veteran, is co-owner of Wisconsin-based Midwest Template Services