Templating, Seams and Installation

Turning Your Slab Into a Countertop

Once you have tagged a slab, the rest of the job is deciding how your kitchen is cut out of it. That is a design decision as much as a technical one, and it is worth understanding before you approve anything.

Templating

We template after the cabinets are installed and before the slab is cut. Never the other way round, and never off a set of plans, because cabinets as built are rarely cabinets as drawn.

The template itself is a laser measurement of the actual cabinet run, walls included. Riverside walls are almost never square. In the older Wood Streets and Victoria Avenue houses they can be out by a surprising amount, and in newer stucco tract housing on slab the walls are straight but the floor may not be.

Two things get checked first, and if either is wrong the countertop is not the fix:

• Cabinet level. A run that is out by more than about an eighth of an inch across its length has to be shimmed before stone goes on. Stone does not flex. Setting a slab on an unlevel run puts point loads into it and leaves a visible step at the seam.
• Overhang support. An island with more than about ten inches of overhang needs steel brackets or corbels underneath. Three centimetre stone is strong but it is not structural, and people sit on island edges.

Where the Seam Goes

Almost every kitchen has at least one seam. Anyone promising otherwise is either quoting a very small kitchen or is not telling you yet.

What we do is photograph the slab you tagged, then lay your templated cabinet run over that photograph so you can see exactly which part of the stone becomes which part of the kitchen. The seam appears on that drawing as a line, and you approve where it sits.

Good places for a seam:

• Behind or through a sink cutout, where the sink interrupts the eye anyway
• At an inside corner, where the change of direction hides the joint
• Somewhere the veining runs across the joint rather than along it, so the pattern carries through

Bad places, which is where a seam ends up when nobody planned it:

• The middle of a long open run with a light directly above it
• Straight across a cooktop cutout, leaving two weak rails
• Anywhere the veining meets at an obvious mismatch

Seam width itself should be about a sixteenth of an inch, colour matched with a two part epoxy tinted to the stone. A well made seam in a busy granite is genuinely hard to find. In a plain white quartz you will always see a line, and that is physics rather than workmanship.

Cutouts and Reinforcement

Sink and cooktop cutouts are where countertops break, almost always in transit or during the lift rather than in service. Undermount sink cutouts are polished on the inside edge because that edge is visible. The rails either side of a cooktop get rodded or reinforced where the span is long.

Faucet and soap dispenser holes are drilled at the shop, not on site, so if you have not chosen the faucet yet, tell us before fabrication.

Safety and Compliance

Two things belong in any honest description of this trade.

The first is silica. Cutting and grinding engineered quartz releases respirable crystalline silica, and California now regulates that work tightly, with wet cutting, ventilation and respiratory protection required in the fabrication shop. It has nothing to do with the finished countertop in your kitchen, which is inert and perfectly safe. It has everything to do with how the shop treats the people doing the cutting, and it is a fair question to ask any fabricator you are considering.

The second is the boring end of the job. Sink cutouts and plumbing reconnection are coordinated so the kitchen is out of action for a day rather than a week, and any electrical work around a cooktop cutout is left to a licensed electrician.

Install Day

Old tops come out, which on a tiled counter is messier than people expect and sometimes takes the backsplash with it. New stone goes in, gets shimmed level, seams get pulled together and set, cutouts get final polished, and edges get a last pass.

Then leave it alone for a day before loading it up. Call (951) 567-6051 to get on the schedule.