Worktops in Wood Street

Yes. Wood Street is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E17. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Waltham Forest. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. 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 reserved slab is a slab nobody else is allowed to buy. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The front door of the building sits at the top of a step off a tiled path, so the carry starts outside the building rather than at the door of the flat. 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. Long narrow rooms want a pale face at the working end. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. 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. Brittle stone and narrow returns are a poor pairing.

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. Speckle forgives a joint that a sweeping figure never would. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first time. 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. Cutting is done wet and extracted, never dry on a pavement.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. Batching several kitchens together is the one situation where buying a whole slab is cheaper per kitchen rather than more expensive. 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. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. 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.

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. Extra depth sounds free and frequently buys another slab. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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. What the room obstructs, the layout pays for in slab. 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 surface chosen for a photograph rarely survives the cooking.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. 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. Priced by the square metre, lived with by the square inch.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. The original stair has an open well running the full height of the building, which occasionally lets a long piece go up vertically where it would never take the turns. Alcoves either side of the old breast chop the run into short lengths, and a kitchen made of short lengths is the case where buying a slab outright beats buying the square metres, because the remainder is paid for in both. A tall room carries a thick edge; a low one does not.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Four kitchens ordered together take one template visit and one delivery, and that is where the saving comes from rather than from a discount on the stone. 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. A surface for a let flat is chosen for the next tenant, not this one.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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. Where the run beats the slab, the stone decides how the seam reads.