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Maurice Huertas and his wife purchased their first home in Florida in 1997. At that time, he was reading sports news for a local Spanish language television network. Their first house had everything the young couple was looking for when it came to design and layout, but the kitchen and bathrooms needed to be updated. "I told [my wife] that if she was willing to see through that, one day we would get somebody to do some custom cabinets and nice stuff in the house."

After deciding to purchase the house, it was another three to four months before Huertas finished his research and chose a cabinetmaker for the job. Once the cabinets were completed and installed, countertops had to go in, but with so many options, Huertas didn't know where to start, so he called his dad for some advice.
Huertas grew up in Colombia, and was raised in his parent's glass factory, where most of their projects were upscale shopping centers and luxury apartments. Of course his father said, "You have got to go with granite."

"Anywhere you go outside the United States, granite and marble has been used for years and years," Huertas explained about the call to his father. "It's the most beautiful and natural thing to do. He said, 'What else are you going to use?' "

Hands-on Renovation

After going through the phone book and using his news contacts to check out each and every company background, Huertas found that only three of the 10 listed had what he felt were credible fabrication facilities. But, when the companies came in to take measurements, Huertas was less than impressed. "I knew how to handle a measuring tape," he explained. "I would look at these people measuring my kitchen and they would fumble with a measuring tape, and I would think, 'No way.' "

During the renovation period between cabinets and countertops, Huertas' sister and brother-in-law flew into Florida, and his brother-in-law suggested to him that the two of them could do just as good a job as anyone else fabricating his countertop in the garage. Huertas was skeptical of his dentist brother-in-law's expertise, but was settled to know that his family had owned mines and quarries, and he was familiar with the process. Huertas agreed, but couldn't find a distributor who would sell slabs to an unlicensed fabricator. He went to city hall and became licensed, went back to the distributors for the slabs and completed his kitchen renovation.
"We made it all by hand in my garage," said Huertas, "and it was heavy and dirty and it was a disaster, but we got it done. You better believe I'm proud of that."

N. O. Spells No

After completing the countertop, the cabinetmaker finished his work, offering compliments to Huertas on the new countertops. Friends came and went, noticing the remarkable work on the countertops, and word gradually began to spread about the new fabricator in the area and those interested in quotes began to call. Huertas wasn't in the granite business, and didn't want to be "fabricating in the sludge," but he could not seem to get people to understand his polite "no."

Huertas decided that if they wouldn't listen to "no" they would surely go somewhere else when they found out what his going rate as a fabricator was. He remembers one lady in particular. "I sat down, and thought, this time I'm going to make sure she says 'no,' " Huertas remembered. "The total for the job was, $6,500 and I wrote up a rediculous quote to get out of it. I sent it, and two days later she calls me and she says, 'You know, Maurice, you're price is pretty high, but I talked to Vern, the cabinet guy, and he said you were the man. So, I sent you the deposit for it.' I thought, now what am I going to do?"