CAN I SAVE MONEY BY USING OFFCUTS FOR MY KITCHEN WORKTOPS?

Customers often ask if we can use offcuts to create their kitchen worktops. The motivation is generally financial – offcut or remnant stock is cheaper, and we create stone products like vanity tops, hearths and sills from offcuts almost every day. But can we use offcuts or remnant slabs for entire kitchens?

The short answer is “No”, unless the kitchen is really small. You probably only need to read further if you are curious about how kitchen worktops come out of quartz slabs.

A kitchen plan recently sent in with a view to using offcuts

Offcuts in the warehouse

The kitchen shown above is not enormous, but those splashbacks make a large amount of material in total. They would come very neatly out of two jumbo slabs as shown here, but two jumbo slabs are not exactly offcuts or even remnants. They are what we would typically buy in especially for a medium-sized kitchen.

If the material in view is a fine-grained or randomly-marbled quartz – like Global Lunar, AG Carrara or even Cambria Berwyn – a cutting plan like this would work. It doesn’t matter which direction the sections come out in, or how they relate to each other.

However, what the customer actually wanted was Calacatta Gold – like our own AG version shown here. Those big veins constrain how you cut the slab. Even if the customer said they wanted badly matched veins and pattern (and actually, no one does) our workshop and fitting teams would be very unhappy about doing such an installation. The splashbacks and upstands should come as far as possible off the back of the adjacent worktop run so that the veins can run beautifully up the wall. But that means using more material – a third slab is needed to make anything like a good job of this kitchen. Check out the three slab cutting images below to see how we would plan this kind of installation.

The only kitchens where cut-price stock is likely to be useful are very small ones – like this galley kitchen in Horley. Even then, it will nearly always be a remnant slab (singleton slab left over from a larger batch) rather than an offcut that can be used.

We use offcuts and remnant stock almost daily for small jobs – hearths, vanity tops, tables, shelves, windowsills and other elements of a home which benefit by being made in stone. For these smaller projects – most often done on a Supply-Only basis – offcuts are ideal and we are able to give very low prices on them.

We are Affordable Granite. We are the leading installer of granite and quartz worktops in Surrey, Sussex and across the South East. For questions, queries and quotes connected with any aspect of worktop installation or kitchen design, please contact us on 01293 863992 or by email on sales@affordablegranite.co.uk