Worktop installation in Brixton

Yes. Brixton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW9, SW2. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. The kerb decides the start time. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

The rear wall is usually a single brick thick and has been rendered, patched and re-rendered, so it bows in and out along the length of the run. The day is planned backwards from the hall. Carried once, and carried properly. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Nothing bears on plasterboard.

A car will often hold more than its doors will admit, and it is the clear width between the door edges that a piece actually has to pass through. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Four hands or eight is settled before the tail lift drops. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. Van to door is the distance that matters.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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. The building keeps working around us. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. A slipped slot takes the next one with it.

The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. One datum for every run in the room. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. The awkward corner goes in first, not last. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. 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.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. It adds an hour or two to the day, and that time sits in the schedule rather than being taken out of the finishing. Fixings find the studs or they find nothing.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. The piece is offered up, marked, taken back out and cut, and that cycle can run twice before anything is bonded down. A bonded mitre goes down on one plane or not at all.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. Suction pads go on once the face is clean and dry, not before.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The island is set against the perimeter, not a wall.