Worktops in Catford

Yes. Catford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE6. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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. Thirty millimetre stone unloads slowly and thin stone does not. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Electrics went in at conversion, some in surface trunking and some chased into lath and plaster, so no cable route in these rooms is safe to assume. The kitchen in one of these sits in the back addition and takes its daylight from one end, so the working half of the run is the darker half and a pale stone with a honed or matt face does more there than any colour with depth in it. Side light flatters movement and wastes a flat colour. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. 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. A cut-out beside a notch leaves very little stone in between.

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 remnant worth keeping rides back on the van rather than to a skip. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. Sintered surfaces are the hardest of the three to machine and the messiest to cut wet, which is precisely why none of that happens on a public pavement. The packaging and the spent cartridges leave with the crew.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. 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. Four samples by post settle more than four showroom visits. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. 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. Movement across three metres is not visible on a hand sample.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. Runs in view together come off adjoining areas of one slab. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. Heat at the lip of an opening is the slow kind of damage. Send the run lengths, say where the sink and hob will sit, and tell us which way the room faces and what lighting is going in above the working run. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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. Cleaning spray, not showroom light, should decide the finish.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. The obstruction is templated as found and cut as templated.

A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. Where a seam becomes unavoidable the choice of stone starts to matter, because a fine even speckle closes a joint almost invisibly and a broad vein simply will not. Thinner stone carries easily and asks for continuous support.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. An island is the piece that decides whether one slab covers the kitchen or two, and a second slab arrives as a step in the figure rather than a gentle slope. Edge metreage climbs with corners, not with floor area.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. 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. What sings in a bright room can go dead in a dark one.