Kitchen worktops in Falconwood

Yes. A planned interwar estate of near-identical semis backing onto woodland, so kitchen layouts repeat: rear kitchen with a garage or side passage on one side, most now opened into the dining room for a 3.2m to 3.6m L. 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. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. Half a day of parking buys half a job.

1930s speculative semi, interwar detached and postwar infill. The classic arrangement is the original back room with a later extension bolted onto it, so the kitchen is two ages of building in one room. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. Sound carcasses are the one condition.

Wide crescents and cul-de-sacs with garages and drives on almost every plot; the railway and the main road cutting across the area limit through routes more than parking does. Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. 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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Six flats, six days, one kitchen at a time. The original attached garages give something rare round here, a level, covered spot to set up and cut on site.

Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The sink is chosen before the cut list is set. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. 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.

A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Emptying the room belongs to the keyholder, not the crew. 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.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. No money is taken before the template happens. Solid brick with a sand and cement render is firm to work against and reliably out of plumb across the length of a run. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. The tiles above will want attention once the old top goes.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same 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. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. The carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. We would sooner lift a gate off its hinges than force a piece past it.

Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. It sets the crew: two fitters where the route is straightforward, four where it is not. That is what the morning is planned around.