Kitchen worktops in Cann Hall

Yes. Tightly packed terraces with narrow back additions, giving galley kitchens of 2m to 2.6m where the fridge often ends up in the through room. Conversions to upper and lower flats are widespread, so kitchens sit in rooms with awkward chimney breasts and no external door. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. A narrow gap between parked cars decides how a panel turns.

Victorian terrace, converted terrace flat and small post-war infill. Cornice runs round the head of the wall, so the wall units stop under it and the splashback band is trapped between two things that are not going to move. Lath-and-plaster on the party wall and the chimney breast returns almost never runs true, so a 100mm upstand bedded on silicone is the honest answer here, it rides the bow and hides the junction the worktop can never close on its own. Sockets in a stud wall move more easily than sockets in brick.

Streets are narrow with permit bays on both sides and heavy overspill parking from the surrounding area, so getting kerb space within 20 metres of the door is the usual challenge. No side access on most houses, and rear gardens back directly onto each other. Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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 room is cleared for the way out as much as the way in.

Worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Four flats, four days, no scaffold week. Chimney breasts in converted flat kitchens mean two short pieces and a return rather than one continuous run, and both need individual templating.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. 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. Upstands follow the return round the corner. 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. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. What is behind the old top decides the day. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Programme work takes the flats in sequence. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The beading was covering a bowed wall.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. 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. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. Splashbacks come off the same slab run as the tops, which means the decision has to be made before fabrication starts. The tile line that was there proves nothing about level.

On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Nothing changes hands until after the template. The side return was an outside toilet and a coal store before it was ever a kitchen, and the walls left over from that are half a brick thick. Socket positions, sill heights and wall flatness are the three things that settle this, and all three are properties of the building. Old walls take a scribed upstand better than a rigid panel.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. The hob panel is sized after the extractor, not before.