Worktop installation in East Dulwich

Yes. East Dulwich is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE22. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. 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. Moving the van mid-fit costs an hour nobody budgeted. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. The day is planned backwards from the hall. The house sets the order of work. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A forced back edge cracks weeks later.

A piece carried on edge up a flight has to clear the ceiling above the stairs as well as the walls either side of it. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. The way in is agreed before the crew is booked, not after. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. Everything comes indoors before the loading window closes.

It sits second or third on this patch, behind worktop fabrication. Same template visit, same benches, same installers either way. 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. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Fire doors stay shut, so the carry route is longer. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. The last trade in inherits every delay before it.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. One datum for every run in the room. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Mark it, lift it, cut it, offer it up again. Clear the full hall and stairs route of furniture, bikes, coats and stair-gates, and keep the front door propped and unobstructed for the carry. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. The managing agent books the lift, not the household.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The island is set against the perimeter, not a wall.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. Scribing takes longer than the carry does, so the quiet half of the day is the half that runs over. Levelled first, then set, then sealed.

Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Fitting is booked as a run of consecutive days rather than as separate visits, which is what makes several kitchens in one building workable. A date agreed in spring is a hope by autumn.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Steel under the overhang before stone goes near it.