Slab Fabrication and Installation

Cutting to a Plane That Exists

Once the cabinet run is flat and templated, fabrication is a matter of decisions made in the right order. Most of them are about where the stone is weakest and what is underneath it at that point.

Choosing the Slab

We walk the yard with you where the material justifies it. Granite is a natural stone, so the slab you look at is the slab you get, veining and all, and two slabs off the same block still differ. Quartz is engineered, so the sample is a fair prediction of the whole piece.

For Riverside kitchens, one difference is worth knowing. Quartz contains a polymer resin. Under sustained direct sun through a west facing window in an inland summer, a quartz top will expand and contract slightly where a granite one effectively will not. It is not a reason to avoid quartz, and we install plenty of it. It is a reason the run underneath a quartz top has to be right, because a material that moves a little on a base that is out of plane is the combination that cracks.

Remnants are worth asking about on a small job. A bathroom vanity or a laundry counter often comes out of a piece already in the yard, which takes a meaningful amount off the price.

Seam Placement

A seam is not a defect. On any run longer than a slab it is unavoidable, and pretending otherwise leads to worse choices than placing it well.

Where a seam should go:

• Over a cabinet division, so there is structure directly beneath both sides.
• Away from a sink cutout, where the stone is already reduced to a narrow bridge.
• Away from a cooktop cutout, for the same reason plus heat.
• Where the pattern lets it disappear, if the first three allow a choice.

Where a seam should not go is wherever the offcut happens to fall. That is the seam that opens.

Cutouts and Reinforcement

Sink and cooktop cutouts are the weak points, and the corners are the weakest part of the weak point. A square internal corner concentrates stress at a single point, so every corner gets a radius rather than a sharp turn.

Across a sink cutout the remaining front rail can be narrow. Depending on the span and the material we rod it, letting steel or fibreglass into a kerf on the underside and bedding it in epoxy, or fit a flat bar. An undermount sink then hangs from brackets carried by the cabinet, not from adhesive holding it to the underside of the stone.

Overhangs and Islands

Unsupported overhang past roughly ten inches needs steel underneath. We size a plate, let it into the top of the cabinet so it sits flush and does not lift the stone, and set the slab on that.

Corbels are a legitimate answer where steel will not fit, but they are the second answer, because they put the support at two points and eat the knee room the overhang was for.

Setting Day

The stone goes onto a bed that contacts the cabinet along its whole length, not on dabs. Seams are pulled with setters, colour matched, and tooled flush. Then we check the finished top for movement before we leave, because a top that rocks under hand pressure on day one will not improve.

Call (951) 976-4250.