Kitchen worktops in Fulham

Yes. The classic SW6 job is a side-return infill on a two-storey terrace, giving a kitchen of roughly 5m by 3.5m with a 3m run along the flank wall and an island of 2.4-2.8m, usually in quartz with a mitred 60mm edge. Because so many of these houses have also gone up into the loft, the structural work is done before you arrive and the walls are new and square, which makes single long pieces realistic. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load sheet carries the parking note with it.

late Victorian two-storey terrace, Edwardian terrace, purpose-built mansion flat and loft-converted family house. The bathroom upstairs sits directly over the kitchen, so its waste comes down in a boxed corner from floor to ceiling that no worktop is going to move. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. What leaves the bench is what fits the room.

Uniform terraced grid with CPZ permit bays, so the van goes on a suspension or a short loading window and the trolley run is 15-30m. Front paths have a step and a gate, halls are around 1m wide with the stair on one side, and the kitchen sits at the far end past a doorway that is often only 760mm - the door leaf and stops come off before anything moves. Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Pieces wait on trestles until the fitters call for them.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. 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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The void ends whether we have finished or not. Take the kitchen door and its stops off first - a 760mm opening will not pass a 900mm island top and people always find that out at the worst moment.

The step or level change between the original room and the return is real, and the units need packing before stone goes across it. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. The overhang is cut with its support already sized. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A bonded mitre goes down on one plane or not at all. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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. Emptying the room belongs to the keyholder, not the crew. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.

A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A communal flight is out of use while a piece is on it, so the carry is timed so nobody is trying to pass on a half-landing. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Every re-grip is a chance to chip a piece, so they are planned out.

Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The kitchen normally sits in the back addition or a later side return, which puts the run against the oldest and least straight wall in the building. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. Every piece is numbered to the wall it belongs against.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Rooflights along a side return mean the worktop is lit from directly above all day, which shows every ripple in a surface and every gap at a scribe. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Edge work on a return matches edge work on a length.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Many of these had a bathroom or a WC built onto the far end of the addition, so the room now ends at a stud wall rather than at the original brickwork. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. The bow in an old wall is cut for, not sanded out.