Kitchen worktops in Albany Park

Yes. A single large interwar estate built alongside the station, so house types repeat almost exactly: rear kitchen around 2.4m by 2.7m with a side door, dining room in front, and a knock-through producing a 3.4m run and a breakfast bar. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. The fitting slot is set around it, which is why we ask about it when the date is booked and not before we leave the yard. Forty metres of carry changes the shape of the whole day.

1930s Albany Park estate semi, interwar terrace and postwar infill. Front gardens are short and the path runs straight to the door, so the carry from a van at the kerb is a few metres over level ground. The fitting itself is slower than the carry: original plaster on the party wall and around the old chimney breast is rarely square to the run, so back scribes get cut on site, and where a return wraps into a breast recess we template that shoulder tight and ease it in. The slow parts are slow for a reason.

A uniform grid of wide roads with drives and dropped kerbs on most houses; parking is easy except right around the station at commuter times. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The room is cleared for the way out as much as the way in.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Four flats, four days, no scaffold week. Because the house types repeat, so do the surprises, the same buried chimney breast and the same sagging back wall in every one.

The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. A galley is levelled as one plane, both sides together. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Nothing about it is a discovery on fitting day. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Whoever lives there hears the timing first. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. The last piece in has the least tolerance left.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. Old material is stacked outside rather than left along the route.

Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. A van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. We would rather start at seven than argue with a warden.

Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Cam-lock carcasses get braced before stone lands.