Kitchen worktops in Charville

Yes. Ex-local semis and terraces largely on their original footprint, runs of around 2.7m with the back door in the corner, and refits driven by landlords and first-time buyers rather than designers. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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. The old tops have to go somewhere as well.

1930s estate semi, postwar terrace and ex-local housing. The hot water cylinder sits in a cupboard opening off the kitchen or the landing above it, and the pipework to it drops through the corner of the room. The plaster is bonded straight onto the concrete, so the bottom course of tiles tends to bring plaster with it when the old top comes off, leaving a rough band behind the upstand. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not.

Wide estate roads with grass verges and paved hardstanding, no restrictions, and you can generally park directly outside the door. Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. Whether the strip-out is a cut-up job is settled at template.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A deposit deduction rarely covers a new top. Original mid-century base units are 500mm deep, so a modern 600mm top overhangs badly and you either replace the carcasses or accept a large front oversail.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. 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. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Sealant seals. It does not fit. 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.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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. 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.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. A joint behind a tap is a joint on show.

Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The awkward metre takes the longest.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. The scribe is cut on site or it is not cut.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. The panel behind a hob is usually the tallest piece in the kitchen, and its height is set by the extractor above it rather than by the wall cupboards either side. Panels come off the same slab area as the run.