Kitchen worktops in Cubitt Town

Yes. Family houses here have a ground-floor kitchen at the rear with a garden door, usually a U or L of 3m to 4m total run, and a fair number have been extended sideways for a small island. Riverside apartments have compact kitchens with the run interrupted by a balcony door. Where the drive is shared, the half-hour the van spends in the way is agreed with the neighbour in advance rather than apologised for at the time. The fitting slot is set around it, which is why we ask about it when the date is booked and not before we leave the yard. The clock on the bay runs whether the lift is free or not.

1980s-90s riverside terrace and townhouse, post-war estate and recent riverside apartment. The kitchen usually sits along the internal spine of the plan with the glazing at the far end, so the run itself has no window and no daylight on it. Everything comes up in the lift, so we measure the lift car's internal diagonal before the piece is loaded, because a car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a 3m worktop no matter how you stand it. Settlement is packed out, never levered out.

This is the easiest part of the peninsula for a van, with off-street parking and driveways on many of the 1980s houses and level access to the front door. Riverside blocks are the exception, with gated courtyards and lifts sized for furniture rather than 3m slabs. Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Suction pads go on once the face is clean and dry, not before.

Worktop installation, 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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The building keeps working around us. Houses here allow a single-piece run straight through the front door, which is worth taking advantage of instead of defaulting to a joint.

Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. The return is offered up last. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. If it will not drop in, it goes back out to the saw. Material is quoted supply only from £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are given their own lines rather than one combined figure.

The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A void between tenancies has no spare days in it. Tell us what the building is when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are planned in rather than discovered.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Mitres are pulled together, never pushed.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. A step up from the drive to the threshold turns the last two metres into a lift, and a lift is where two pairs of hands become the minimum. A van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. Slack in the day gets spent on the street or on the fit.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Nothing is carried past an obstruction that could have been moved.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. The hall is cleared before the first piece comes off the trolley.