Worktops in Collier Row

Yes. Collier Row is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM5. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. A figured slab takes longer to match than a plain one. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The window sits in the middle of the run over the sink, and its board and cill set the limit on how tall an upstand can be. These kitchens are small and roughly square, so the run is short, the join count is low and the material band accounts for almost all of the figure rather than the bench time. Short pieces are the argument for buying a slab outright. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. 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. The narrowest return in the kitchen is its weakest stone.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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 long granite length at full thickness is four hands, not two. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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. Stone is delivered machined, sealed and covered, in that order.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Batching several kitchens together is the one situation where buying a whole slab is cheaper per kitchen rather than more expensive. 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. Several kitchens at once should come off a single batch. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. 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. The entry end of the range is real stone, not a compromise.

A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. Where the run beats the slab, the stone decides how the seam reads. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Porous or sealed is a decision about the next ten years. Measure the run between the walls, note the cill height above the units, and tell us the thickness of the top that is coming off. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. Where nobody will be around to maintain it, the surface is chosen for indifference: an engineered top asks for nothing beyond a cloth, while a natural one wants sealing and someone willing to do it. Durability is cheaper than taste over a ten year hold.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. 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. A short upstand shows a fragment of pattern, never a run of it.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. 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. An overhang is stone and steel priced together, never stone alone.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. 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 face is uncovered once, and that once is at handover.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Base units from the seventies and eighties are often only 500mm deep, so a 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors want checking against it. Coming off a thick laminate top changes the front edge, and twenty millimetres reads closer to what the room is used to than thirty does against existing tiling and a window board. A tall room carries a thick edge; a low one does not.