Kitchen worktops in Brimsdown

Yes. Interwar terraces and semis where the standard job is knocking the small kitchen into the back reception to make a kitchen-diner, giving a 3.6m run along one wall and a table at the far end. Islands rarely fit - the rooms are long and narrow rather than square. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. Where the van must move, the waste goes on first.

interwar terrace, 1950s semi and light-industrial conversion. The outside walls are cavity and the party wall is solid brick, so fixings behave differently on the two long walls of the same room. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. Nothing goes back on carcasses the building has pulled out of square.

Easiest access in the borough. Wide roads built for the industrial estate, verge parking, and most houses have a driveway or a dropped kerb, so the van can back up close to the door. A level threshold with hard standing outside it is the one arrangement where a full run goes in without a single re-grip. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. The opening is measured on the diagonal, not across the frame.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, 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. Consecutive days, one kitchen at a time. When the old dividing wall comes out you are left with a nib and a beam - agree whether the worktop dies into the nib or runs past it before templating, it changes the joint position.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Old runs are rarely square, and stone will not forgive it. A brick pier standing into the run divides it in two, and the join goes against the pier where a clear wall would have needed no join at all. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. It is the slow part of the day and it should be. Supply only, material begins at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on separate lines rather than as one number.

An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Communal floors are protected the same as private ones. Describe the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the schedule rather than met on the day.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Offered up twice, bonded once.

If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. 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. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The window over the sink sits at about worktop height, so the run is set out around the sill and the reveal rather than under them. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. A thicker top changes what clears the top drawer.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Pieces wait on trestles until the fitters call for them.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. 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. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. The building keeps working around us.