LOL at all the responses about the beverage testing.
As for the flagstone, the issue we have is that in our design because we're semi-geometric and very modern, the variation of flagstone just looked a little out of place to us. It also wasn't as thick as we would have liked ideally. Nothing was even mortared on them yet. We met with the builder today and we discussed options. We'll eat the cost on the flagstone and possibly use it as stepping stones in the landscaping. Something like this:
As a possible solution, he pointed us to a place called stonecreekpavers.com . They do a wide range of cast stone (ie concrete) standard size pavers, capstone, etc... and can also do custom work. They have a standard 2 1/2" wall capstone that we are going to look at. They do several standard colors, but they just added in January a color called graphite which is pretty dark and I think will be perfect for our needs. Pricing is not too bad at around $10/sq foot with the softened edge option (called pencil edge).
Because they also do custom work, we are going to look at this for the floating steps. We had a bit of a disconnect with the builder on these it looks like. The bid price was $3800 for the step option and we assumed that this included a hefty materials allowance. We had trouble tracking the material we wanted (bluestone), and ended up going back to our old landscape architect to find out where he got the original one we already had a as step for the patio. Turns out these are not cheap at 4" thick. We got a price of $750 for 3 of these from one company. Thinking we could do better on pricing, we checked with another and they came back at $1100.
This evidently was above the materials budget which as best I can tell was based on using standard available 2" flagstone slabs which is too thin. Then when we started looking at how these needed to be installed with a 4" step, the stone was going to have to be notched so that the half of it that you saw in the pool was 4" and the other half that looks like it is going through the bond beam had to be 2" so it just sat on the bond beam and would be level with the coping. I asked the cheaper of the two stone yards to quote on that notching and they came back at $1900 total cost for the 3 steps!!!!
The one upside is if we do the steps in the same color/finish as the capstone, then it will tie those features together nicely. The downside is that I really liked the idea of a natural looking stone material for this. It had kind of a ying/yang quality against the precision of the pool geometry. I think I am good either way though and the cast stone option if we like the samples we've requested is going to end up being MUCH easier to install, more inline with the materials allowance and also give a more uniform look to the steps.
plat.
