We’re making more progress on our kitchen remodel. Yesterday, Jen and I found a source for our granite countertops. We initially planned on using the granite people from Costco Home since we are using the cabinet people from Costco as well (Baywood Cabinets in Kent, WA).

Unfortunately, we were told it would take several months for them to get around to our order. We then spent some time calling granite folks all over town to try to find any way to complete this kitchen remodel in 2005.

We found a place in West Seattle (I will update this post with their info later) that offers slabs for $300 a piece. We figured we could do our entire kitchen with 4 slabs. This is a great value and their referred us to a guy with 20 years experience installing granite who only charges $45.00 an hour. They can have the granite ready in only 4 weeks. It pays to shop around.

Now, for those of you who don’t care about my kitchen saga and prefer my technology oriented, let me tie this all together for you.

I wish we could have entered in “granite seattle” into one of the local search engines and more easily have found out who would meet our timelines, who polished and cut the granite, who offered installation. It took several weeks of asking all of our different friends and people we know, then several weeks of calling to ultimately find the company that worked for us.

What this really means is there is a ton of room for improvement in how the Internet can make chores like this easier. I know the search engine players like Google, Local, A9, and MSN are focused on this huge market. There are also some interesting start ups like Judy’s Book that aim to use social networking and reviews as a way to improve this often painful process.