Once upon a time we didn’t have a granite worktop factory. When Affordable Granite began, there was no fully equipped workshop. A large amount of work was even done on customers’ own sites – in gardens, driveways, or even in the road. And, though we say it ourselves, we didn’t do a bad job. There was no way that the firm would have survived, let alone grown as it has, without a very good proportion of satisfied kitchen worktop customers.

However, working in gardens is not ideal. Mess is created, (with dust control a critical factor for our fitters’ and customers’ health), you become weather dependent, and it is much harder to attain the kind of consistency in quality that we would hope for. And customers’ expectations of what quality looks like have risen steadily since our beginnings back in 2003. Buying large scale kit and putting it in a workshop or factory is the way to go.

Over the years, Affordable Granite has invested steadily more in our granite worktop factory. A quantum leap was in 2015, with the doubling of our floor area, and a mass of new kit. But that process has gone on since. From hand tools to our first bridge saw, from our first baby CNC to the two massive Intermacs we now run, from polishing wheels to the edge polisher and the Jenny Lind face polisher, huge sums have gone into making our workshop safe and efficient and capable of delivering the kind of consistent finish that we, and our customers, expect.

We also take our environmental responsibility seriously. In our workshop that has meant investing in ever-improved recycling plants, to clean and reuse the large quantities of water required in cutting and polishing.

We welcome visitors to our office, and can often take people into the factory, although this may be subject to work intensity and safety considerations at the time. We regularly work with customers to position templates / plan slab cutting so as to get just the look they want, especially out of wildly patterned granite slabs. Wherever possible, we want the customer to feel that they can be part of the planning and process of getting granite and quartz worktops into their home.