Kitchen worktops in Bushey Mead

Yes. Uniform interwar semis with rear kitchens that owners typically extend by two or three metres to create a kitchen-diner, keeping cabinetry on one wall and putting a dining table where the garden door used to be. Compact islands of around 1.8m appear where the extension is wide enough. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Two loads, one space, one day.

1930s semi, Interwar terrace and 1970s infill house. The windows were steel to begin with and have been swapped for plastic in openings lined out to suit, so the reveal is now deeper than the brickwork behind it. What catches people out is the junction between the old floor and the extension floor, which is rarely at the same level, so a run carrying across it needs the units packed before stone goes on. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Wide residential roads with no controlled parking make this one of the easier areas for van access in the borough. The limiting factor is usually the side alley between semis, which narrows at the gate post. A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. A carry that needs six hands gets six hands.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. 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 fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Consecutive days, one kitchen at a time. Because the houses are near-identical, sizes repeat, but never assume it, the extension depths vary by a metre either way between neighbours.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The old cut-outs prove nothing. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Expect material from £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised on their own lines rather than folded into one figure.

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. One visit where permission only stretches to one. Mention the building when you book. The lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice then go into the plan instead of turning up on the day.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Crittall windows were swapped for plastic ones in openings that were made good rather than rebuilt, which leaves reveals that are neither straight nor equal. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. The units are relevelled before anything new is bedded.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. 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. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Any overhang gets underpinned first.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Ceilings are lath and plaster at the front and plasterboard in the extension, and the join between the two marks where the original back wall stood. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. An old kitchen has moved, and the stone is cut to that.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. Nobody sets a worktop down mid-flight to change grip.