Kitchen worktops in Charlton

Yes. Steep streets of Victorian and Edwardian terraces with rear-addition kitchens, plus interwar semis higher up the hill where the kitchen is a small square room off the hall that owners usually open into the dining room. Runs are typically 2.4m to 3m in an L, islands only where a rear extension has gone in. 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. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. The old tops have to go somewhere as well.

Victorian terrace, Edwardian bay-fronted terrace, 1930s semi and postwar council maisonette. These were built with a scullery that has since been swallowed by an extension, leaving a change of floor level roughly where the run crosses. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. What the last fitter did to the wall shows up on strip-out.

The roads climb hard from the riverside up to the village and parking on the terraced streets is nose-to-tail; the interwar semis higher up usually have a drive, which changes the job completely. A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Four hands or eight is settled before the tail lift drops.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. The building keeps working around us. Some of the steepest carries in the borough are here, if the van can't get above the house, budget for pushing a slab up a 1-in-8 pavement.

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. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The shape is measured again, not copied off the old top. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A forced back edge cracks weeks later. 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.

These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Keys confirmed the week before, not the morning of. 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.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. Suction pads go on once the face is clean and dry, not before.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Laminate hides what the gables are really doing.

The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. A slipped slot takes the next one with it.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. The rear room has a bay or a wide window onto the garden, so the sink length is short and the real working length is on the return. Carcasses are checked for square and fixed back before a stone top goes on them. The units have settled with the floor and get re-levelled.