Worktops in Alibon

Yes. Alibon is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM10. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Whatever the standing allows, the stone leaves that van finished, because every edge, cut-out and internal radius is machined at the works and none of it is open to reconsideration at the kerb. Nothing is ever colour matched outdoors under a grey sky. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Front doors off the deck open into a lobby barely wider than the door itself, and the turn out of it is a right angle. Kitchens in this stock are compact and worked hard, so the surface is chosen for indifference rather than for attention: quartz where consistency matters, sintered stone where heat and scratching are daily events. Four visible edges make the profile part of the design. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Every notch and every scribe is machined into the piece before it leaves the works, and a hard sintered surface is the least forgiving of a tight internal corner, so one is always cut with a generous radius. Strong daylight is an argument for a surface built to take it.

Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. That caps the longest piece, and a run split into two lengths nests differently on the slab, which moves the yield and moves the figure with it. A hard route shortens the list to lighter, thinner surfaces. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. The film stays on the face until the last trade leaves.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. Where several kitchens are ordered together the sensible move is to take them all off one batch, because two slabs of the same name bought six months apart will not sit happily in the same building. A surface for a let flat is chosen for the next tenant, not this one. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. Where the cooking is serious, heat tolerance leads the list.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. A shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. Cut-outs take material out of the piece that carries the sink. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. A hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. A deep scribe moves the pattern back along with the depth. Send the run lengths, a photograph of each corner so we can see the boxings, and tell us how the kitchen is used day to day. A leaseholder paying for their own kitchen inside managed stock still needs the freeholder to consent, and that consent is about the building and the common parts rather than about the worktop. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. The middle band is where most fitted surfaces honestly sit.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. A run that sits under strong sun for hours every afternoon suits a surface built to be stable in daylight, because a resin-bound stone is made for indoor use and sustained sunlight is the one thing it was never designed around. Thirty millimetres bridges a gap that twenty millimetres will not.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. A deep scribe eats into the back of the piece, which is quietly important on a stone with directional figure, since the pattern moves backwards as that depth comes off. A cranked piece eats more slab than the two straights it replaces.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Adding an island is what moves most of these projects from one slab to two, and that jump is the single largest step in any worktop quotation. Order the stone against the room, never against the drawing.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The original plan had one sink position, and moving it means taking a waste through a wall that does not want to be cut. Which stone belongs on top of all that is a separate question from the building itself, and it is the one with a figure attached, because supply alone runs from £110 to £550 per square metre before a single cut has been made. Priced by the square metre, lived with by the square inch.