Owning your own home

On the subject of kitchen worktops, what's the advice for a non-wooden worktop? We are replacing an old wooden one, so are contemplating a change.

It sounds like for stone or quartz worktops they need to be templated at great expense. Any other suggestions?

It's not just the templating that costs the money, it's the material and what has to be done to it to shape it for your kitchen. Marble/Granite is great if you're not OCD, otherwise you'll be polishing it the whole time, especially if it's black.

These stones are also porous so you can bleach them with some oven cleaning products and stain them with oil. Personally I wouldn't have quartz, to me it lacks the personality of a natural stone. There's a huge warehouse in Battersea called MGLW that has massive amounts of stone, you can buy a sheet and then instruct a mason to make it up. The stone they have there is incredible, they have a website with pics but it doesn't beat a visit.

You can template it yourself if you want. Just remove your current worktops and cut 3mm hardboard to exactly the same size. If you want different shapes/overhangs then cut 3mm hardboard to the shapes. Mark your sink position and give it to the stone mason. If you screw up they will charge you or worse you'll have ruined the material, but generally if you're a couple of mm out on the template you can chase the wall a bit.

great advice re worktops.

i'm in a position where i'm looking to replace mine just with something cheap and cheerful as a year or two down the line i plan on ripping it all out when i do a proper extension. so at the moment i've painted the units so they don't look too shabby. i like the look of wood, but don't really want to pay a lot for a solid oak worktop that will ultimately get ripped out later.

is it worth going for a cheap laminate type? if so do you or anyone know of any decents websites/deals out there? i need aboout 3.5m of it...

they can, but the building control comes round at various stages of the build. so you could raise it 100mm then ask them to come round and declare it's ok. it's a risk you're right, but i'd kick myself if i didn't go for it. i did and it paid off ;-)

quartz, to me it lacks the personality of a natural stone.

Can you explain how it isn't a natural stone. The science in me is bewildered.

I had a marble worktop in a flat I rented for a while and it was hell on earth to try and not ruin what I assume was a very very expensive worktop.
If I were to do my kitchen over I would use Ply for a worktop...

https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/483644447453271573/

Cheers. That place looks epic!

See, granite sounds great, but I don't like the fact that it is porous and could therefore stain, which would wreck a very expensive worktop.

Are there any options that are less expensive than granite or quartz?

Resin/Corian maybe? Ms Hammer's parents have one that wraps around the whole room inc breakfast bar and it looks pretty impressive with no visible joins. They have a matching choppingboard too, which is neat.

Most of the quartz available in the UK as worktops, I'm led to believe, is quartz resin bond.

So quartz dust, mixed with resin and cast.

Cross post from the mortgage thread...

Old bump...

Any mortgage people about?

Before going to get official advice I wouldn't mind some unofficial internet style advice on mortgages...

Up until November 2014 I was paid simply by PAYE, I then got given a stake in my business meaning I moved to partial PAYE and some dividend (PAYE 50%), then in July I got given a bigger stake in the business, and we change payments again, so I am now about 10% PAYE and 90% dividend. We are looking to move in the new year

So my two questions are;

1. Is this little bit messy situation going to mean I can't get another mortgage easily?
   
2. With dividends going forward I have a choice of taking them regularly, with an occasional top-up when there is extra profit about or to just take much larger chunks every 5 months of so, will it matter for mortgages which one I do? To me it feels like a regular income is a good thing to show...
   

Kind of ties in with Airtime's question but there are 2 trendy options I've heard of, one I've used and the other I've only had recommended.

Bushboard is a laminate which has a quality finish and the laminate is a few mm deep so it can be routed for recessed sinks etc. It's nice stuff, good to work with and forgiving on joints where you can fill and polish it unlike normal laminate.

The other is Richlite which is very architect friendly, it works very much like hardwood/board but looks contemporary design etc. etc. I've not used it.

Best option for cheap kitchen worktops in wood is Beech. It's chemically neutral (or something like that), Durable and reasonably priced in the thinner versions, I think Ikea do it by the sheet.

For laminate worktops there are one or two stand out brands, Formica being one of them. The quality of chipboard/density and thickness of the laminate are defining qualities. I usually go to a laminate worktop specialist and choose on price depending on the job. These days most of the kitten work I do is high end so the worktops are someone else's problem.

And don't worry too much about staining/bleaching natural stone. Just don't go into it assuming they are indestructible. You can seal them on an annual basis with stone sealer that makes them less porous.

If you do happen to make a tahini sandwich late one night and the neat oil spills from the lid onto the countertop, then you only notice it the next day, you can fix most of the damage with powder/flour and a stone cleaning product (don't ask me how I know!).

The main problems are around the hob if you splash a lot of oil during cooking and areas where you have oil bottles standing that might have oil on the bottom. So basically repetitive long term issues. The oven cleaner problem is very hard to get around with quartz, I've seen black quartz bleached in minutes by oven cleaner and I don't know any way to fix it. If anyone else does I've got a client who would like to know.

It's a pleasure to live with, I would go/have gone for a sandy coloured one with iron and silica deposits. They show the least dust and crumbs and the reflections are forgiving.

I cant offer any solid advice but a friend of a friend of a friend was in a slightly similar situation and I believe he told a friend who passed the message on to me that he may of just lied through his bloody teeth that he was still on the same salary and still PAYE and got a new mortgage. Thats what my mate told me anyway.

I should have said, if you use a bit of beech countertop for a few years you can make furniture/shelves out of it when you've finished with it.

gotcha.

Ha!

I like your thinking, annoyingly my current mortgage is with my bank, so they may wander why they have been all over the place, but I was tempted to just pay a standard dividend every month and see if they thought it was PAYE...

Mortgage companies won't worry about when you take your dividend, they'll look at the company accounts. If there's enough profit to take a decent divvy then the accounts will show this and all will be well.

Lots / most / all high street lenders will just want an SA302.

I suppose you could deny being a director/partner, hope they don't check and then falsify the employment reference when it comes through to say you're all PAYE, but I'd not recommend committing mortgage fraud, it could end badly for you.

Yes, not keen on the mortgage fraud bit.

Guess it will all come out in the wash when I start applying. Slightly difficult bit is that the company has been running for about 5 years, but hasn't really shown any profit, until this year when it was restructured (hence me becoming director) and is now going to show a very healthy profit, just have to hope they don't see that as a one-off!

Talk to an experienced mortgage broker. Many lenders won't like you for the exact reason you say and will want to see 2 good years, a few are more understanding.

Do you need to remortgage or move now? It might pay to wait a year.

They may well look at the last three years accounts and take an average.

Thanks both... I will go to an advisor, current mortgage is with Halifax, so will speak to them as well. I'm happy to wait a year, my wife not so much.

Average of last three years wouldn't be too bad as it will be something like 100k, 100k, 500k, so probably would be OK...

This is what ours did. It was a bollock as I had invested a load of money in kit the previous year so had shit all profit compared to this year and it dragged my score right down.

I just got a new mortgage (last week)

needed:

3 years (most recent)

3 * SA302
3* Signed accounts from an accountant
2 * Tax overview

They averaged the figures over the 3 years to work affordability and mulitiplyers.

All went through fine, but thats because my monthly outgoings are high. So my annual draw down against the company is high. A collegue has a different lifestyle so draws less from his company, ergo his annual figures are very low but his co surpluss is high.....he went through a broker but same paperwork rules applied. Just got rejected at the 'computer says' level but approved when the underwriter looked at it

Can anyone recommend a Putney-ish person to service / repair our boiler? The boiler's been playing up for 7 years, but ticking along. With the newborn in the house, I don't really want to risk a few days without heat again as it gets colder. I'm hoping they can either repair, or tell me if we should just replace it.

Cheers!