Kitchen worktops in Carshalton Beeches

Yes. Wide plots laid out as a garden-suburb style estate, so kitchens are generously sized even before extending, and most projects add a full island plus a utility. Larder cupboards and rear porches from the original build usually get absorbed into the new layout. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Packing takes its cue from the distance to the door.

1920s detached, 1930s detached, large inter-war semi and post-war infill. The scullery floor was quarry tile bedded on concrete and it is often still under a laminate, sitting lower than the boards in the room it now joins. Most of these have a side passage and a back door, so a full-length piece can usually reach the kitchen without being cut down, and the piece sizing is driven by the slab rather than the route. The piece is made for the room the builders left.

Very good. Wide tree-lined roads, deep front drives with room to turn, and side access down the flank of most detached houses straight to the rear. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. A carry that needs six hands gets six hands.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The building keeps working around us. Being able to get straight round the side means single lengths over 3m are actually deliverable here, so the design should take advantage rather than defaulting to a joint.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The corner is proven on the bench first. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. One visit where permission only stretches to one. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The original plan put a larder and a back door on the same wall, and both leave awkward stubs once the room is opened up. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Two slabs get sequenced when one will not cover the run.

Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. A slipped slot takes the next one with it.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Yield is worked on the slab, not on a calculator.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. The classic arrangement is the original back room with a later extension bolted onto it, so the kitchen is two ages of building in one room. What does drive the bench work is the knocked-through kitchen-diner: the return worktop and any peninsula are seen end-on from the dining side, so we nest the pieces so the veining carries across the internal corner in the same direction rather than turning through ninety degrees. A settled corner leaves the bench as a real angle.