all right everybody I'm at one of my suppliers warehouses and this is where I go to pick up a lot of my natural stone I'm basically going to show you how to pick or select natural stone a lot of the natural stone comes from three different locations Mexico Turkey or India and the issues that are ongoing with these different places are a lot of cronyism in India there is certain like if you want onyx there's probably four major quarries that that have onyx and there's two controling families in India that give money to the government to get the contracts to keep it forever and then they set the price in Pakistan there's also onyx but it's not as good there's different types of stones depending on what stone you want usually someone controls it overseas and controls and sets the price and it's usually some family or something and then of course it all trickles down to here us in the US and we buy from these different places and then it ends up here particularly with the fireplaces that I offer travertine is is a good material to use because it is specifically designated a dry stack stone dry stack meaning that you can use no mortar or grout I would say on the joints use mortar of course to set it to the substrate which will be cement backboard but it has a nice clean finish so what I'm going to show you today is how to select travertine that's imported from Turkey because a lot of the travertine comes from Turkey and what Turkey exporters do is they will say hey look look at this travertine it's great there's like four or five different grades of travertine and they will show always their best to their suppliers and their suppliers say oh I'm going to get a container of that that's great I can totally sell that and then when the container shows up here it's horrible really horrible so what they do is they try and give just enough good material so that whoever buys from them doesn't cry I or complain or say hey I'm never buying from you again so you as a consumer when this stuff comes in you have to go select out that twenty or thirty percent that's the premium stuff that they put in there on those pallets for your home because they're there is everything good travertine and bad travertine them about to show you in a minute this is David Texas best flooring company see you in a minute okay so this is a pallet of travertine that we usually use for like the fireplace but what we do when we select your your travertine is we hand select everything sometimes it takes six hours just to find the best travertine for fireplace this would be considered obviously in ugly piece that we would never use on your fireplace you can see it's pitted it's got too many mineral deposits on the surface and it's just really really a poor piece of travertine this would be the piece that we would use on a homeowners house no mineral deposits on the surface and no nope little to no pitting whatsoever and see nice that's a really good nice piece right here so this process takes a considerable amount of time to hand select every piece but that's why the finished product looks so good but when you select travertine you really have to check it out yourself because you don't want to end up with this when you can have something like this so that's why I said you know these importers will import a container of travertine and a certain percentage will be this and you have to really go and spend the time to get something that looks like this in order to have a beautiful finished product so we do all that for you which at Texas best flooring company and that's why our finished product looks great okay so we're gonna we just dumped the box of three by six travertine and we're going to go through them like this would be a good piece the corners aren't chipped this is good we'll put this in the box for the customer this is another good piece not too bad this is okay this is okay this piece too much going on way too much going on or you can see it's got a chip corner so this would be a piece that we'd set to the side piece is a little better this is a nice piece so we do this each backsplash takes about three hours to pick out the material and we make sure that every piece is hand selected so if you order online and we send it to you see as a chip right there or we do it for you we will make sure that everything has personal touch see like this is fill this is horrible this is a horrible piece they fill it with some kind of grout or or some kind of fill that if you bump it with a pan if you bump this this will pop out someday and then you have to fill it yourself so this is already a liability this piece so what why would I give that to my customer that's why you got to take the time to make sure that every piece is hand selected when you're dealing with natural stone beautiful piece okay so I just wanted to give you a quick lesson on Phil so travertine when they cut it you have these different indentations or hollow spots just because of the way in travertine is naturally made over time the problem is if this is your face in this case here they need to go ahead and fill all this pitted stuff so they fill it with man-made material here well like I said this is a liability to the customer any product with too much fill denotes a lesser quality travertine this right here is really awesome good quality travertine this is in the same box as this this is the same price as this it just takes time to pick out these among these and this what we do here at Texas best flooring company we use our expertise to make sure that the customer pays the same price as this and gets this verse paying the price for this and getting this crap it is straight out a liability so it is bad so that's why when you're shopping for travertine you really have to make sure that the less fill on the travertine the better