Kitchen worktops in Brondesbury

Yes. Heavily converted villa stock, so most kitchens are in flats carved out of larger rooms with the plumbing chased to wherever the stack allows, giving short 2.4m to 3m runs in odd-shaped rooms with a chimney breast in the way. Owner-occupied whole houses are the minority but tend to want a full rear kitchen with an island. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. A suspension for the full day beats half a day lost.

Victorian villa converted to flats, Edwardian terrace and 1930s mansion block. These kitchens are big rooms with long perimeter runs and an island, so level has to hold across the whole floor rather than along one wall. These are the multi-piece jobs: long runs, a large island and often a range cooker that cannot be moved, so the stone is templated in several pieces and how the vein runs across the joins matters. A new top on a settled run needs the run corrected first.

Steep front steps up to raised ground floors on the villas, converted flats on first and second floors reached by the original staircase, and permit parking that fills by mid-morning. There is rarely any off-street space. Spindles and a newel cap stand proud of the string, so the usable width on a turn is measured to the handrail rather than to the wall behind it. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Nothing is carried past an obstruction that could have been moved.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Six flats, six days, one kitchen at a time. Chimney breasts and boxed-in stacks mean two shallow returns instead of one clean run, and the template has to record the actual out-of-square rather than assume 90 degrees.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Same shape, different cut list. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A scribe is a cut. It is not an adjustment. Supply-only material opens at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line rather than as a single number.

The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. One visit where permission only stretches to one. Say what the building is at the booking stage and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice become part of the plan rather than a surprise.

Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Big rooms hide their falls, and the difference from one corner of a five metre floor to the other is measured in tens of millimetres. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. An old kitchen has moved, and the stone is cut to that.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. The hall is cleared before the first piece comes off the trolley.

Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. The old cut-outs prove nothing.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Original walls are thick, lime-plastered and rarely straight, which makes dry-laying and scribing the bulk of the fitting day. The old island top is frequently sitting on units that were never fixed down, which is fine for laminate and not for stone. The fabric gets checked while it is open.