Worktops in New Eltham

Yes. New Eltham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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 film stays on the face until the last trade leaves. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The roof space above carries services, so a boiler flue or a soil vent can drop into a corner of the kitchen and stay exactly there. 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. At four metres a stone is a tone rather than a pattern. Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. 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. Internal corners are cut with a radius because square ones crack.

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. Where a break is unavoidable it goes into the quietest part of the pattern. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. Four quartz samples arrive by post, well before anything else does.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. 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. 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. Buying for hard use is a different exercise from buying for looks. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. 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 remainder of a slab is bought whether it is fitted or not.

The advantage of a U is that every join can be put over a gable in a corner, so nothing lands in the middle of a clear length. 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. One slab or two is the biggest single jump in any quotation. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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. An engineered surface yellows under standing warmth; natural stone does not. 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. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. 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. One stone across a portfolio is worth more than a small saving.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Two runs and a return into a rear extension is the pattern, and the return is the piece that never nests neatly on a slab. 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. Colour gets chosen under kitchen lights, never under showroom ones.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. The short run at the head of a U usually sits under a window, so that piece is scribed on three sides at once and has nowhere left to be pushed back to. 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. A mitre asks the pattern to turn a corner and be believed.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. A side passage and a back door mean the stone rarely has to come through the house, which changes the job more than most people expect. The surface is where the money actually moves: across the 181 kitchens fitted the median is £220 per square metre, and half of them land between £165 and £300. Stone is bought whole and paid for whole, offcut and all.

Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. Strong daylight is an argument for a surface built to take it.