Kitchen worktops in Cranham

Yes. Later suburban stock on the eastern edge, mostly detached houses and bungalows built from the 1950s onwards, so kitchens are already reasonably sized square rooms and rarely need structural work. The common job is a full refit within the existing shape, new units, a U-run with a peninsula, and quartz that has to work with an existing tiled floor the client is keeping. 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. 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 waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there.

1950s-1970s detached, post-war semi, bungalow and 1980s estate house. A boiler in a cupboard on the kitchen wall is normal in this stock, and its position is fixed by its flue. Post-war terraces have small, roughly square kitchens with a back door and a window in the middle of the run, so runs are short and joins are rare, but there are usually two corners and a window cill to work around in a couple of metres. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not.

Very easy: wide estate roads, individual drives, garages, turning space and no parking restrictions to speak of. A loading bay or a red route puts a clock on the unload, so the pieces come off in the order they will be fitted rather than the order they were loaded. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Every re-grip is a chance to chip a piece, so they are planned out.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. The building keeps working around us. Existing floors are usually staying here, so we protect them properly and check base-unit heights against the finished floor rather than the slab.

The two returns in a U are close to the same size and it is tempting to nest them side by side, except that the veining then mirrors across the room and reads as deliberate for the wrong reason. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Carcasses have to be sound first. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. The whole slot, or the stone waits. 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.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Someone stays on the trailing end the whole way in.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. A stub wall divides the kitchen from the back lobby, and it rarely stayed where the original drawing put it. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Laminate hides a level that stone will not.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing changes hands until after the template. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. A boiler hangs on the wall above the run in most of these, and its pipework drops exactly where a splashback wants to go. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. Chipboard carcasses get bracing before stone lands on them.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Ceiling heights dropped after the war, so there is less wall between the worktop and the wall units than in anything older. The units are often 1970s or 80s and only around 500mm deep, so a standard 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors and drawer fronts need checking against it. Nothing goes back on carcasses the building has pulled out of square.