Can you help with joining wooden countertops together?” Question of the Week 28.03.15

‘Can you help with joining wooden countertops together?’

March’s final ‘Question of the Week’ comes from Jacquie in Norwich. She is planning her new kitchen and wanted to know if we could help with the joining of her wooden countertops.

QUESTION:
“I am in the midst of planning my new kitchen, and I most definitely want to go for wooden countertops, but I would like to know if you can help with joining wooden countertops together, or if you can advise on how we would do this ourselves.”

ANSWER:

Hi Jacquie,

Thank you for sending your question in – we’d be delighted to help in any way that we can.

Joining wooden countertops is – by comparison to stone and laminate surfaces – a fairly easy job, provided that you have the right tools to hand.

If you are joining two worktops together in the corner of a kitchen, we would recommend using a butt joint. This method is where the worktops are joined directly together, using specialised worktop connector bolts. To accommodate for these bolts, recesses will need to be cut into the underside of the worktop, ideally using an electric router.

You can read more about joining worktops together in this way by reading our Butt Joints Nutshell guide. If you need to, you can also order worktop connector bolts as part of our Worktop Installation Kit, which also includes a router cutter, mitre seal and slotted brackets for securing the worktops to your kitchen cabinets.

As well as butt joins, there are other methods of joining worktops together in a corner – most notably a mitre join. However this particular type of joint is not recommended as it does not allow a wood worktop to move sufficiently with changes in environmental temperature.

To create a wider worktop surface, we recommend using biscuit joins to hold the two pieces of timber firmly together. This method requires small recesses to be routed into the side of the worktop, into which timber ‘biscuits’ are firmly placed. Glue is then applied to ensure that the biscuits stay in place and the rest of the worktop seals firmly together without a noticeable seam.

For further information about these other types of joins, please refer to our How to Join Wooden Worktops Nutshell guide.

Of course, if you don’t feel like you have the wood-working expertise to undertake these worktop joining methods yourself, we welcome you to take advantage of our bespoke cutting service which is carried out by our own in-house fabrication team.

Our skilled craftsmen can create any number of bespoke worktop alterations, as well as pre-routing recesses for butt joins, and creating wooden surfaces up to 1200mm wide.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any other queries about this service.

All the best,

Ben @ Worktop Express

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