Kitchen worktops in Berrylands

Yes. Very uniform interwar suburban stock - the same rear kitchen footprint repeated street after street, usually extended straight back to give a 4m galley or an L with a 3.6m main run, and a utility carved off beside the back door. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Nothing this long gets walked while a warden is circling.

1930s semi, 1930s detached, postwar infill and modern flats. Ceiling heights are modest and the window over the sink is wide and low, which leaves a shallow band for tiling or an upstand. These kitchens are nearly always retiled at least twice, and stripping the old tiles takes the bottom course of plaster with it because the original laminate top ran underneath the tiles rather than up to them. Panels expose a wall; upstands forgive one.

Quiet residential roads, off-street driveways at nearly every house, and dropped kerbs that let the van get within a few metres of the front door - about as easy as access gets in the borough. 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. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. A polished face close to an edge does not survive a knock.

Worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. 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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Sealed before we leave. Because the houses repeat, so do the mistakes - the original kitchen window sits low, so upstands regularly clash with the sill and need cutting down.

Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. Corners get their own pieces. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The gap closes on the grinder, not in the sealant gun. 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. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. The managing agent books the lift, not the household. 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.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. The crate stays on the van until the route in is clear.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. Level is checked across the room, not along one wall.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. 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. No payment is due before the template. Suspended floors at the front meet a solid slab in the extension somewhere in the middle, and the units sit across the change. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. The route is walked before the first lift.

How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Consecutive days, one kitchen at a time.