are you a diyer looking to sharpen your skills,looking for solutions for home improvement issues, getting advice when needing to hire a contractor,and staying up to date on the latest the industry has to offer on news and trends? you are in the right place. welcome to discover your home with your host,mark lotz. hey everybody, mark here with discover yourhome. hey brian, thanks for joining us tonight,appreciate it. what i'm going to talk about tonight is quartzcountertops. well we'll talk about quartz in specific,talk about a company or product that i like
to use. i’ve used them for several years. the company is called cambria. some of you are familiar with it. they are a family-owned company out of lesueur, minnesota and they make quartz natural stone surfaces, and you can use themin many different applications that we'll talk about several of them. we're going to talk about the pros of theproduct itself, talk about some colors, talk about some edges that you can put on kitchencountertops, and why i like to use it, and
why we're using it in a lot of folks’ homes,and hopefully this can answer some questions for you guys out there viewing us tonight. cambria quartz, let's talk about quartz andwhat is it? quartz is basically a natural mineral in theearth and we mine it out of the ground. quartz countertops or quartz material is basicallymined, mixed with polymer resins so it's about 90 - 95 % quartz to 5 or 10 percent polymers. they heat it together and mix it all togetherin a big batch, press it and they come out in large sheets like granite and marble. so, where granite and marble is mined fromthe earth, quartz is also but then it's man-made.
so, we're looking at naturally nature madeand man-made so that's kind of the two differences of what they are once they come to your home. with cambria, there's a lot of different thingsthat i like about it. one, they give you a ton of color designs. i think approximately 133, and they usuallyadd three to four a year, and for the most part, you get a wide range. so, you're talking from light medium to darkcolors, maybe i'll show you a couple here real quick. i'll show you these are some that we've actuallygot installed.
let me grab one of them here real quick. this one is on the real dark side. this is called wellington, i’ll get it upa little closer there, and they're very dark. you can see that there's some shiny fleckin it. it's kind of a really dark brown with kindof some silver veining in it, looks incredible. we did this sitting on top of a rustic hickorycabinets for a customer of ours. his office in his basement. beautiful, turned out stunning. the pros, the things that i like about quartz,number one, is it's a harder material than
marble and granite so it makes it more durable,it's harder to chip, it's harder to scratch, and it's less likely to stain. so, it's a pretty durable surface. what i like about the quartz material, thecambria material versus say a natural stone is, natural stones are a little bit softerand they are porous. if you get real close and you look down onit on a granite countertop, you can see these little pits in there. that just the natural product itself, so alot of times granite or marble will have to be sealed, especially in a kitchen applicationwhere you've got raw chicken and materials
that you don't want to kind of leach intothe surface. so, you have to seal and polish a lot of thegranite and marble that's out there. so, this you don't, it's pretty durable stuff. real easy clean up. everything is very mild soap, a nice softcloth, warm water and you're done. there really doesn't require a lot of effortto clean it. it looks beautiful, that's certainly i haveno doubt. every customer that we have put them in theirhomes, whether it was in a bathroom, kitchen application, office, fireplace, there's alot of areas that you can use this product
in. you can put it on your floor's, backsplashes. we just recently did a project that we usedit as a backsplash. turned out stunning and we're really happyto see it. there again, what i do like about this isfor probably most cases, what we use it in is kitchens, because you are working aroundraw foods. if you get get some chicken or pork or beefon your countertop, you simply wipe it off. you don't have to worry about it leachinginto the surface. very hard, very durable.
so, let's talk a little bit about some ofthe edge profiles that they have out there. we're going to talk about three tonight. i think they have roughly about 19 at themoment. we're going to talk about three. i want to talk a little bit about the oneswe use the most, the ones that we see a little bit and kind of a special one. so let's talk about the seacliff edge. i'll turn it on its side here, you can seethat there. it's got a bevelled edge on top, it's notrounded, it's just a nice beveled edge.
this is what we're putting in, i would sayprobably about 85% of the time. a lot of the look is very clean that we'reseeing today so this is a very simple clean look. i believe this the waterstone collection. i'm not sure, it might be buckingham but looksnice, very standard, and you can get them in 133 different color designs. and they come in several thicknesses. standard in kitchens, what we've put in isthree centimeters. this profile comes in two, three and fourcentimeters but this is pretty standard.
and that is called your seacliff edge by cambria. let's talk about and that's commonly use bathroomsand kitchen countertops. we're going to go to a little more uniqueedge. let's take a look at that color, it's puttingkind of kind of wild. that is the aberdeen color and this is whatthey call the chiseled edge. i'm going to see if you can see it on theside here, give it a little bit of a look there. it's very rough, it's the moraine edge bycambria, and i don't know it's probably backwards there for you guys but it's very natural.
if you've got more of a natural-looking finishedcabinet, folks are putting this in their basements where they kind of make… you know, in thechicagoland here area, a lot of folks travel up to the great north woods of wisconsin andmichigan and they like to do their basements in more of a kind of a natural north woodsfeel. so, this is kind of gives you that real roughtexture look to it so in in a powder room, in the basement or maybe in your cabin. so nice, look, real rough finish, looks morenatural. you definitely want to go kind of a rusticfeel. the color with this is pretty interesting.
probably not my choice but it might be yoursand that color was aberdeen with the chiseled moraine look. then our third and final edge here is themitered edge here. it's called the rimrock. rimrock edge and this is two centimeters,and what this is really designed for, it's mitered at the pieces here and they kind ofepoxy them together, they miter them and squeeze epoxy together and this is great for bar topsand islands. and what it does is, it's a thinner materialthan that three centimeters, let’s lign that up.
it's a lighter in material but it looks heavierand appearance so this is great on kind of a bar in the basement where you got that nicebig front edge. people kind of lean up against. i believe this color is called berkeley. we've done this color, looks stunning. in fact, last year we just recently did akitchen with this countertop in the kitchen so there again, beautiful but very unique. also, you can see where customers are usingthe quartz for even furniture so there's some real unique things that they can do with it.
what i like about cambria is i really lovehow they put everything together on their website, very classy. they give you a lot of information. they also have an online magazine called cambriastyle so you might want to check that out, done beautifully. they're just elegant, classy, they give youa lot of ideas. one thing i really love is they have workedtogether with benjamin moore on a paint match tool. so let's say you pick out the color callednew quay and they have four selections that
go along with that color. and i'll tell you what, a lot of our customerslike that because it's simple, it gives them a quick visual to what you have there, andworks really well. we've done it in several homes and peoplelike the ease of the selection of color. so, just kind of run through a couple of colorshere for you. that's new quay. these are the ones that are popular that we'veput in the last couple of years. this is called aragon. bradshaw.
berkeley and buckingham, and they're all verysimilar. i know it's kind of hard to see maybe on yourscreen but they're very similar but a little difference. some have a little more black. the one thing about quartz is you get a moreconsistent look in a slab as opposed to a granite selection. you can get these in samples of 3 by 3 and12 by 12. i highly recommend whoever you are workingwith to get a 12 by 12 sample. get a couple of different colors in your houseunder different lighting.
and if you could, that would be that'd bewonderful. you'd be surprised on how much differenceone versus the other will look. hey manny, thank you for joining us. so that's about it as far as the product,a little bit of the information. we're going to come back and revisit someother profiles, other colors and other applications for you. hey i'm mark. thank you again for joining us on discoveryour home. we'll see you guys next week.
thanks so much for listening to this episodeof discover your home with your host, mark lotz online at lotzremodeling.com that's lotzremodeling.comand on twitter and facebook lotzremodeling. we'll catch you next time.