Worktops in Chelsea

Yes. Chelsea is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW3. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of the borough. 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. 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. The packaging and the spent cartridges leave with the crew. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. 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. Movement needs length, and length is what these rooms have. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. 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.

Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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 forced seam is a material decision before it is a fitting one. 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. 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. Dry cutting quartz burns the resin and the burn does not polish out.

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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. A small kitchen still buys the remainder of the slab. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Colour names outlive their batches by several years.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. 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. Every return end is another polished face to pay for. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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. Hard use by people who did not choose it points at sintered stone.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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. A honed face marks on grit, so nothing is set down bare.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. 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. The slab is the decision; the room only sets how much of it you need.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. Quartz is the sensible default where a kitchen changes hands often, because there is nothing to seal, nothing to re-seal and nothing an incoming household has to be told about the surface. Fitting follows template by five to ten working days.