Worktops in Plumstead

Yes. Plumstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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 offcut is yours if you want it and ours if you do not. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Boxed sash frames swallow a hundred millimetres of wall on each side of the opening, so the wall between a window and a corner is shorter than a plan makes it look. 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. Two slabs change the question from price to preference. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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 cranked piece eats more slab than the two straights it replaces.

A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. 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. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. 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 sealer needs a dry face and a quiet hour after it.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop fabrication. 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. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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. A surface for a let flat is chosen for the next tenant, not this one. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. 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. Where the cooking is serious, heat tolerance leads the list.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. 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. Long unbroken lengths are what make a plain stone look dear. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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. Short lengths are where a full slab starts to pay for itself. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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 let kitchen is specified for indifference, and rightly so.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. 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. Original shutter boxes survive in the reveals of the front rooms and stand proud of the plaster, and that is the line a run under the window has to be scribed to. 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. The island earns the liveliest part of the stone.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Where the kitchen has taken the bay, the end of the room is three facets of glass set at angles and there is no straight wall left to finish against. Ceilings are tall and the joinery is usually painted, which is the setting where a thirty millimetre edge looks right and a slim one reads as a saving somebody made. Movement needs length, and length is what these rooms have.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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 narrowest return in the kitchen is its weakest stone.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. 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. Edges are charged along their length, not across the surface.