Worktops in Putney Vale

Yes. Putney Vale is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW15. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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. Hard-working kitchens suit surfaces that ask for nothing. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. 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. Movement in a stone needs length to read as anything at all.

Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. 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. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. 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. Specify before the room is finished, not afterwards. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Repeat work rewards a single decision taken carefully.

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. Where the shape is broken, a repeating pattern is worth money. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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 tight inside corner is where brittle material gives up. 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. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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 wall decides the scribe and the scribe decides the depth.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. 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. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. A deep scribe eats into the back of the piece, which is quietly important on a stone with directional figure, since the pattern moves backwards as that depth comes off. Sealing suits stone that drinks; nothing else needs it.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. 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. Long unbroken lengths are what make a plain stone look dear.