Ashburton worktops
The kitchens we meet in Ashburton
The questions that decide stone worktop supply and fitting in Ashburton are dull ones about doorways, corners and what the floor is doing, and they are asked early for good reason. Estate-built semis and terraces with the original small rear kitchen, usually a 2.6-3m run with a larder recess. Owners here mostly replace worktops and doors rather than move walls, so the units stay and the stone has to work around existing cut-outs. If your kitchen is a bit of both, that is common enough and it changes nothing about how we go about it.
Crittall windows were swapped for plastic ones in openings that were made good rather than rebuilt, which leaves reveals that are neither straight nor equal. Stone grows and shrinks a little with warmth, which is the reason joints are gapped, upstands are never wedged tight, and nothing is pinned as though it will sit still forever. Two kitchens of one size can differ by double on the stone alone.
An inter-war terrace is wider than a Victorian one and shallower than a semi, so the kitchen is a compact square room rather than a galley. These kitchens are usually knocked through to the dining room, so the surface is read from two sides at once and the figure has to carry across the pieces rather than restart at every join. Four visible edges make the profile part of the design.
On this patch the buildings are inter-war semi, post-war estate housing, 1960s terrace and low-rise flats. They were built to different tolerances, and the stone has to absorb that.
