Kitchen worktops in Coney Hall

Yes. A very uniform 1930s estate: small original kitchens with a larder, a rear lobby and a separate WC, and most owners take out the lobby wall to gain a metre of run. Finished kitchens tend to be a single L with a small breakfast bar rather than a full island, because the footprint will not take one. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. A short bay slot is when the tall pieces get damaged.

1930s speculative estate semi, 1930s short terrace, post-war infill and bungalow. Whole streets went up to two or three plans, so the house next door has the same kitchen and forty years of extensions have made none of them measure the same. The rear kitchen wall in ex-council flats and maisonettes is commonly dense in-situ concrete or blockwork with a thin skim, which means mechanical fixings are hard work and the splashback is held on adhesive rather than screwed. The age of the plaster decides the fixing, not the finish.

Estate roads with parking on both sides and narrow front drives that only take one car, so the van often sits on the road and a slab goes over the front garden path. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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. Disconnection happens before the old top is lifted, not during.

Worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Four flats, four days, no scaffold week. Taking out the rear lobby leaves a patched floor and a new opening, so we insist the plaster and floor are finished before templating or the run comes out 8mm shy.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. 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. Panel height is set by the extractor. 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. 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. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. The plumber is booked by whoever holds the contract. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. 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. 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. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Strip out first, then measure what is actually there.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Every internal corner is two pieces, not one.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The ceiling is a concrete soffit with a skim on it, so there is nothing to fix into overhead and no void to hide anything in. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Making the wall good first is cheaper than working around it.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. The strip-out is planned around it.