Kitchen worktops in Crews Hill

Yes. Nurseries, garden centres and scattered large houses. Kitchens tend to be oversized rooms in converted outbuildings with exposed brick and timber, a central island doing most of the work, and a preference for honed or textured finishes over polished. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The load sheet carries the parking note with it.

barn conversion, detached country house and post-war bungalow. The floor is often flags or brick laid straight on the ground, so it is solid, uneven and not going to be levelled by chasing into it. Access is off a drive and through wide doors, so for once the piece size is not the constraint - the joins that go in are the ones we choose for layout and veining, not the ones the building forces. A century of movement is taken out at the bench.

Long unmade or gravel driveways off Cattlegate Road and Crews Hill lanes, gates that need a code, and dogs. The last 100m is often the hardest part of the whole delivery. A short run of external steps before the communal door means a piece is lifted twice before the staircase proper has even started. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A join added for access is placed over a gable, never mid-span.

Worktop fabrication, in that order. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. The annexe top comes off the main kitchen slab. Barn conversions have structural timber posts landing inside the room - the island rarely ends up rectangular, so expect a notched or angled slab rather than a standard shape.

Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. 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. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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 drawing decides it, not the fitter. Expect material from £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised on their own lines rather than folded into one figure.

Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Cutouts are checked against the actual appliances, whoever bought them. Mention the building when you book. The lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice then go into the plan instead of turning up on the day.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Straps and battens are chosen for lifting, not just for transit.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Veining is matched across the seam before cutting starts.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Machined to the real line.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Long lengths go down first, short pieces fill around them.