Kitchen worktops in Bromley Common

Yes. A lot of stock with the original small rear kitchen still in place, often 2.4-2.8m of run with the boiler on the wall and a back door in the middle of the elevation. Where extensions have gone on they are usually modest rear infills rather than full-width. 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. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Distance from tail lift to door is the whole risk here.

inter-war semi, post-war council-built terrace, 1960s maisonette and Victorian cottage. The kitchen sits at the rear with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the useful run is broken into two short lengths. That leaves a ragged band right where the upstand has to sit, which is fine for a 100mm upstand that covers it, but a full-height splashback needs the wall made good first or it will rock on the high spots. The wall build-up sets the depth of the return.

Front gardens converted to hardstanding on the private roads make it easy, but the ex-local-authority terraces have shared paths and no vehicle access to the rear, so it is a front-door carry through a narrow hall. A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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 old top leaves by the route the new one arrives on.

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 units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A builder-finish kitchen upgrades in a morning. Boiler pipework and a back door swing eat into the run here, so the template has to work around fixed services rather than the other way round.

A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. 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. Long walls break where the worktop breaks. 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. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The beading was covering a bowed wall. Material is quoted supply only from £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are given their own lines rather than one combined figure.

Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Nothing to reseal is the point in a let. Tell us what the building is when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are planned in rather than discovered.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Solid brick with a sand and cement render is firm to work against and reliably out of plumb across the length of a run. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Boxed pipework decides the panel width before taste does.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. 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. Where it will not come out whole it comes out in sections.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. 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. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. 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. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Strip out first, then measure what is actually there.

Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. 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. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. The doors are staying, so the colour answers to them.