Kitchen worktops in Chelsea

Yes. The Georgian and early Victorian houses off the King's Road are small-boned - low ceilings on the lower ground, timber floors that flex, and kitchens taking 2.6-3.2m of run with a narrow 900mm island at most. Mansion flats on the estate hold their original service plan with the kitchen at the back off a corridor, and a lot of the work is replacing tired timber or laminate on existing units without touching the layout. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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. Loading out is loading in, done in reverse and heavier.

Georgian riverside terrace, early Victorian cottage terrace, Cadogan Estate red-brick mansion block and 1930s purpose-built flats. The closet wing is a narrow projection at the back with windows on two sides, which leaves very little continuous wall for a run. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Whatever the shell has done since is dealt with now.

Many of the older houses are listed, which rules out taking out a window or a sash to bring stone through, and the front doors are period joinery that nobody will let you unhang. Estate-managed blocks impose their own works hours and require notification to the managing agent, and the King's Road itself has loading restrictions through the day. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The building keeps working around us. Listed frontages mean the stone comes through the existing door opening or not at all, so template to the doorway first and the kitchen second.

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 existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Laminate hides what the gables are really doing. A wall line that runs level over a floor that does not means the finish closes up on the plinth at one end, which is joinery rather than something the stone can answer. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The notch is eased until it drops, then bonded. Material is from £110 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting are each quoted on their own line.

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. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A day out of use, told to whoever lives there. If we know the building when you book, the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are worked into the day rather than found on it.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. 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. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. A corner that was butted can be mitred this time.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. 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. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Old runs are rarely square, and stone will not forgive it.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. 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. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see.