Stone worktops in Merton Park

You can plan stone worktop supply and fitting in Merton Park from a floor plan, but the plan and the room have a habit of disagreeing once the tape comes out. The Arts and Crafts stock has deep plan houses where the kitchen sits behind the dining room, and owners tend to open the two into one long room rather than build out, keeping a run along the outside wall plus a dresser-style block. Cabinetry is usually in-frame timber, so the stone gets a heavier profile and a deeper overhang than a modern slab kitchen. The quotation visit costs nothing and commits you to nothing. It is also the simplest way to find out which you have.

Sliding or folding doors take the whole garden wall, so a long stretch of the room has glass where a wall would otherwise carry the units. Gloss level is the decision nobody notices making, because a mirror face under a row of downlights throws hard bright spots the length of the run. Priced by the square metre, lived with by the square inch.

Floors are boards over joists with a solid floor only in the service rooms, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. Long uninterrupted lengths are where the figure in a slab finally gets to be seen, and that is the one setting where a dramatic stone repays what it costs. A galley nests efficiently and frees money for better stone.

The housing here takes in John Innes Arts and Crafts house, Edwardian villa and 1930s semi. The age of the shell tells us more than the age of the kitchen does.

How supply and fit works

On these streets much of the housing went up in the twenties and thirties. Oddly shaped rooms lower the yield, and a lower yield shows up as slab on the quotation rather than as labour. Movement needs a long unbroken length to be worth paying for.

Where the side return has been filled in, the old external wall is now an internal one and still carries its render, its gutter line and its old fixings. The alcoves either side of a breast break the run into short pieces, and short pieces are exactly where buying a full slab outright starts to beat buying stone by the metre. Plain stone takes the seam that a long carry forces.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. A boxed riser standing proud of the wall sets the tolerance a template has to hold, and a hard fired body is the least forgiving thing to dress against it. An engineered surface yellows under standing warmth; natural stone does not.