Kitchen worktops in Coombe (Kingston)

Yes. Some of the largest domestic kitchens in the borough - big open-plan family rooms with an island of 3m or more, a second sink, integrated coffee stations and boiling taps, plus back kitchens or prep pantries with their own worktops and splashbacks. Drives with a dropped kerb and a tight turn-in take a long van at an angle, and that angle decides which side the tail lift can work from. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load sheet carries the parking note with it.

Edwardian mansion house, 1930s detached, 1960s architect-designed house and modern replacement house. The rear wall is usually a single brick thick and has been rendered, patched and re-rendered, so it bows in and out along the length of the run. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. Walls out of plumb are cut for at the bench.

Private gated estate roads with entry codes and a caretaker, long in-and-out driveways with ample standing, and rear garden access wide enough to bring stone round the outside instead of through the house. Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. Households sharing a house tend to want two prep areas rather than one, which usually means an island as well as a perimeter run. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Plot after plot, the same fitting sequence. These are drawing-office jobs - book-matched islands, mitred 100mm aprons and full-height panels, so the slab is chosen off the rack before templating.

Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The return is nested first, because it fits worst. 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. Mark it, lift it, cut it, offer it up again. 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.

One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Access for the whole slot, or a different day. 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.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Deep original skirting is often left in behind the units, standing them off the wall, so the back edge of the stone is plotted where the carcasses actually sit. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Thin partitions get shallower overhangs, decided in the shop.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. Nothing is payable in advance of the template. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Chimney breasts and the alcoves either side of them break the run into short pieces before anyone has drawn a kitchen. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Book-matching is decided at the slab, not at the saw.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The gap closes on the grinder, not in the sealant gun.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The original front door is narrow and the hall is often the only way in, which puts a ceiling on the longest single piece. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. Undermount cut-outs are polished before anything leaves.