Kitchen worktops in Coldharbour

Yes. Postwar estate housing with small kitchens planned around a fixed sink under the window and a boiler cupboard; runs are 2m to 2.6m and worktops are usually replaced piecemeal rather than as part of a redesign. 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. Waste needs a space of its own and the street rarely offers one.

postwar LCC estate, 1950s-60s maisonette block and 1970s terrace. The ground floor is a solid slab with a bitumen membrane and no void under it, so services either run on the surface or get chased into something hard. Ex-council flats and maisonettes are built in dense concrete and blockwork, so anything that has to be fixed back, such as brackets under a peninsula or support for an end panel, goes in with proper anchors and an SDS rather than plasterboard fixings. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Estate layout with parking courts and rear footpaths, and several maisonette blocks reached by an external stair with a tight turn at the top. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A lift diagonal is a workshop dimension as much as a site one.

Worktop replacement and worktop fabrication, in that order. Damage in a let flat is settled as a deposit deduction, so a surface that can be repaired in place is worth more than one that has to be replaced whole. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Nested for the job in front of us. Those stair turns on the maisonettes cap the piece length, measure the turn, not just the doorway.

A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The strip-out is the part worth planning. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The mitre is cut to the angle we found, not to ninety. 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.

Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. We check who is entitled to approve it. 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.

The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Upstands leave the bench in lengths, not as one run.

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 sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. A thinner top drops the run against the tiles.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. Thinner material is specified where the carry demands it.

Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. One drawing set, every unit.