Kitchen worktops in Crayford

Yes. Terraces built for the works have small back-addition kitchens under 2.5m with a yard door, the interwar estates above the town have the usual rear kitchen and dining room, and the newer riverside flats have compact open-plan runs with a peninsula. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Kerbside unloading is planned in the racking, not improvised at the door.

Victorian industrial workers terrace, 1930s semi, postwar council estate and 2000s riverside flats. Ceilings are high and there are usually no wall units, so a splashback runs to whatever height is decided rather than to a cupboard. The kitchen is open plan and the island is often long enough to need a join, and it sits in the middle of the room where every edge is visible, so the join goes over a gable and usually under the hob line where the eye does not follow it. What the shell demands is solved in the shop, not the kitchen.

The town is split by the main road and the river, with a steep hill up from the high street and terraced streets parked nose-to-tail; the riverside blocks have their own gated parking. Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. 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. Old pieces are carried out before new ones are carried in.

Worktop replacement and worktop fabrication, 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 units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. One plot replaced years on, matched or otherwise. The old works terraces have very low ceilings in the rear addition, check head height over the run before specifying tall upstands or a splashback.

Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Levels get corrected before the new top is measured. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

A leaseholder paying for their own kitchen inside managed stock still needs the freeholder to consent, and that consent is about the building and the common parts rather than about the worktop. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Notice goes out before the crew is booked. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. No payment is due before the template. Services coming up through a floor slab mean the island cannot move to suit the stone, so the stone is cut to suit the island. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. The offcut is planned before the main piece is cut.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The load plan follows from it.

Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Windows are large industrial openings with deep sills, and a run finishing at one meets a reveal a full brick deep. Access is by goods lift or a shared stair with a hard turn onto the landing, and both cap the piece length, so the nesting is done to the measured car or turn rather than to the slab. Settled on the drawing, cut once.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. 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. Half a day can go on the strip-out where the way in is tight.