New Wufang Stoneyard in Shanghai

During our December Shanghai trip, one of the days was dedicated to selecting our granite and marble slabs. Granite goes in the galley (kitchen), as you saw yesterday. And marble goes in the heads, the downstairs foyer, and on top of several furniture items throughout the boat. 

So our mission was four different types of slabs. Two for the galley, one being for the turtles as we saw in yesterday's post. And two marbles. The ride out to the stoneyard was about an hour by company van.

Like a lot of things in Shanghai, the scale of this place is like nothing I have ever seen before. I wish I had a person in the above shot. But looking at that ladder should give you an idea. It's about 10 feet high.  Those are huge chunks of quarried stone, waiting to be cut into slabs. 

This will help you with the scale. Deb and I are in the middle. At right is Scott Hauck, our Hampton Yacht Specialist. At left, the one and only Mountain Chicken! That is his English name, evidently derived because he hops up and down on these hunks of stone like a dainty bird. 

Here is another part with mind blowing scale. One or two men work in each bay, and each bay can process multiple slabs. Look at the depth of this building!

There is finished stone both inside and outside the building. After looking at about 100 choices, we selected these two marbles for Mahalo.

Deb and I both love beautiful granite in a home, or a boat for that matter. Searching in this cavernous building I found a stack of these slabs and they just took my breath away. I went to get Jeff Chen, HYG owner, so he could call and have the Wufang guys give a price. But even before they got there he said "you are going to be astonished with this price, it won't work." I'm thinking, well, in the overall context of this boat....  

And then the guys showed up and told us the price. $25,000 US per slab. Well, that would have been nice! 
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Not finding anything else inside that worked for us, we continued the search outside. We had Mountain Chicken (see, I told you he always climbed up) and his crew raise up a few of these slabs and we knew we had our choice for galley counter tops and floor. 

Mountain Chicken showing is "very excited" look.  And happy Deb! (Especially happy that I gave up on the $25k/slab option.)

With the background for the floor selected, now we had to find just the right stone for the turtles themselves. After some more searching we found this mostly black stone and decided it was the one. 

This is a repeat from yesterday's blog post, but just wanted to show again how the galley floor came out. Will be giving Mountain Chicken several high fives when we return to Shanghai! 

This process took an entire day and no less than six people from Hampton accompanied us so we would find just what we wanted. We so appreciate all their dedication to boat building and our own Mahalo.