Kitchen worktops in Croydon Town Centre

Yes. Almost entirely flats. Kitchens are compact open-plan corners of a living space, typically a 2.4-3m run with an integrated hob, a slim peninsula and no room for a separate utility. Office conversions often have very deep floorplates with the kitchen against an internal wall and no window at all. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. The crate exists for the walk from the van.

high-rise apartment tower, office-to-residential conversion, 1960s block and new-build development. Concrete panel walls bow noticeably over the length of a run, so the template picks up the real line and the back edge is cut to follow it. That suits a full-height piece, because a large flat panel bonded across its back is more stable on concrete than a run of small tiles ever was. Sockets in a stud wall move more easily than sockets in brick.

Concierge desks, booked service lifts, loading bays with 30-minute limits and no parking anywhere near the entrance. Everything is scheduled around the building's delivery hours. Handrails, mirrors and a sloping ceiling panel all eat into the usable diagonal, and none of them appear on a lift specification sheet. 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 way out is measured with the way in.

Worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Between tenancies is the only window there is. In tower blocks the lift car dimension sets the maximum piece, and if the goods lift is out we are not carrying stone up twenty floors, so the fit gets rebooked rather than improvised.

A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. 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. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. 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. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

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. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Programme work takes the flats in sequence. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A lift out of service for the day turns a straightforward install into a stair carry, so the slot gets confirmed with whoever manages the building rather than against a calendar. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. It decides whether the old top leaves whole.

Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Kitchens are compact and standardised, which makes the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines a larger share of the total than the stone. Dense concrete takes adhesive better than fixings, which actually suits a large bonded panel. What the plaster is stuck to matters more than its colour.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. A tall panel and a timed bay is the worst combination here.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. 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. Entry-phone access, a booked lift and a parking bay near the entrance all have to be arranged before a date is confirmed. The rough band left where tiles took the plaster with them is covered by the upstand rather than made good twice. A reveal in a thick wall changes where the panel stops.