Kitchen worktops in De Beauvoir Town

Yes. An unusually uniform stock of 1840s villas and semis, so the kitchen is nearly always in the rear half of the ground floor or at garden level, with a rear extension giving an L of about 3.5m and a peninsula. The regularity means the layouts repeat street to street, which is rare anywhere in the three boroughs. A suspension is charged by the bay and by the day, so the number of metres asked for is worth getting right the first 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 carry length sets the number of hands on the job.

1840s Italianate villa, Victorian semi-detached house and conversion flat. The closet wing is a narrow projection at the back with windows on two sides, which leaves very little continuous wall for a run. The day is planned backwards from the hall. Where the wall bellies, the top is eased in against it.

A conservation area with permit-only parking and filtered junctions closing most through routes, so the streets are quiet but hard to reach directly. Houses are set back with front paths and steps, and the internal halls are reasonably wide by period standards. A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Fire doors stay shut, so the carry route is longer. The houses repeat but the rear extensions do not, each one a different depth and squareness, so template every job rather than reusing a previous set of dimensions from the same street.

Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. The join is the last thing finished. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The gap closes on the grinder, not in the sealant gun. 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.

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. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. Protection goes down first. 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.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. Level is checked across the room, not along one wall.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. Scribing takes longer than the carry does, so the quiet half of the day is the half that runs over. The shell has the last word on fitting day.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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. Moving the van mid-fit costs an hour nobody budgeted.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. The hall is the only way in and out for whoever lives there, so it is cleared and then kept clear for as long as pieces are moving. 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.