Kitchen worktops in East Ham

Yes. The typical job is a rear-extended Edwardian terrace where the kitchen has been pushed the full width of the plot, giving a 3.5m to 4m run plus a central island of about 1.8m by 0.9m. Households are often large, so double sinks, two ovens and a lot of continuous worktop are common asks. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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. Everything comes indoors before the loading window closes.

Edwardian terrace, interwar terrace and loft-converted family house. A small room puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on one short length, and the bridge of stone left between them decides whether it can be cut in one piece. The day is planned backwards from the hall. The building moved decades ago and the fit allows for it.

Long straight residential roads with permit bays and some crossovers, so you can generally get a van reasonably close, but side alleys between the houses are gated and often too narrow to pass a 700mm slab on the flat. Where there is no side access the piece comes through the front door and the hallway dogleg. A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Nobody sets a worktop down mid-flight to change grip.

Worktop installation, in that order. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Fire doors stay shut, so the carry route is longer. Extended kitchens here regularly need a three-piece top with two joints, and the joints want to land away from the sink and hob cut-outs.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. 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. 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.

Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Scheme rules on working hours are checked first. 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.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. A spotter on the van is a man off the tools.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Levels are checked across the walkway, not along one side.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. The join is polished flat before we call it done.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Protection comes up only when the last piece is inside.