Worktop installation in Anerley

Yes. Anerley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE20. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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. The clock on the bay runs whether the lift is free or not. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Electrics went in at conversion, some in surface trunking and some chased into lath and plaster, so no cable route in these rooms is safe to assume. We measure the front door, the hall width and the turn into the kitchen before anything comes off the van, because a 3m piece has to swing through that corner on edge and stone does not bend to help you. Old floors get packed, not argued with. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The gap closes on the grinder, not in the sealant gun.

Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. That is what the morning is planned around. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. Slack in the day gets spent on the street or on the fit.

Often enough. It is one of the three, behind worktop replacement. The template, the workshop and the installers are the same either way. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. A date agreed in spring is a hope by autumn. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Book us when the units exist, not when they are ordered.

Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Nothing is bonded until the whole run sits flat. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Level is checked across the room, not along one wall. Clear the full hall and stairs route of furniture, bikes, coats and stair-gates, and keep the front door propped and unobstructed for the carry. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A day out of use, told to whoever lives there.

The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. Handover day is a hard stop.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. The notch is eased until it drops, then bonded.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. The combination boiler hangs on whichever wall happened to be external, and that decision has already used up a stretch of the only wall the run wanted. Scribing takes longer than the carry does, so the quiet half of the day is the half that runs over. The units are shimmed to one datum before stone touches them.

Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. Money does not move until the template is done. Where the walls have been dry-lined over the old lath there is a void behind the board and no solid fixing until a batten is found. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. The room is swept and the offcuts leave with us.