Worktops in Sloane Square

Yes. Sloane Square is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1W, SW3. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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. A sealer needs a dry face and a quiet hour after it. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. 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. Seen from both sides, the figure has to run continuously. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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. The narrowest return in the kitchen is its weakest stone.

Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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 route rewrites the cut list, and the cut list is the price. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. 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. Wet stone reads darker, which is why colour is judged indoors.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. 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. Two slabs bought a season apart are two different stones. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. 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. Buying for hard use is a different exercise from buying for looks.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. 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. A clean nest on the slab is the cheapest thing a shape can do. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. Porous or sealed is a decision about the next ten years. 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. Inventories record the condition of a kitchen at both ends of a tenancy, which is a practical argument for a surface that looks the same in its fifth year as its first. 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. Hard use by people who did not choose it points at sintered stone.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Chimney breasts and the alcoves either side of them break the run into short pieces before anyone has drawn a kitchen. 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. Batch before colour name, because names outlive the batch they came from.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. 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. One slab or two is the biggest single jump in any quotation.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. The unused stone rides back unless you want it, and a granite remnant makes a chopping board, a hearth or a window board instead of becoming waste. Nothing is ever colour matched outdoors under a grey sky.

How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Say what you have and where it came from before anything is booked, because thickness and batch decide what can be done with it. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. Adding an island is what moves most of these projects from one slab to two, and that jump is the single largest step in any worktop quotation. The remainder of a slab is bought whether it is fitted or not.