Stone worktops in Downham

Yes. Downham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR1, SE6. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. 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. Stone is delivered machined, sealed and covered, in that order. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The chimney breast served a back boiler and is usually still standing, so there is a shallow recess on one side of the room. 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. Seen from both sides, the figure has to run continuously. 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. Porous or sealed is a decision about the next ten years.

A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. 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. The protective film peels off last so the finish is untouched. Where the van cannot turn on the plot it has to arrive already facing the right way, so the approach along the street is part of the plan. 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 face is uncovered once, and that once is at handover.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. 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. Edge metreage climbs with corners, not with floor area. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. A short upstand shows a fragment of pattern, never a run of it. Confirm the depth of the units, the total run lengths and whether an island or peninsula is going in, and tell us the colour temperature of the lighting. The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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. A surface nobody maintains should not need maintaining.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. Stone arrives finished, because a kerb is not a polishing shop.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. 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. A remnant worth keeping rides back on the van rather than to a skip.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The chimney breast in the kitchen once took a copper or a back boiler, and whatever is left of it is rarely square to the rest of the room. 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 cheapest stone and the dearest one share a fitting day.

The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Fitting follows template by five to ten working days.