Kitchen worktops in Fulham Reach

Yes. Developer kitchens throughout, so you are usually working to a fixed footprint - a run of 3-3.6m against a service wall plus an island of around 2.2m, all sitting over pre-routed services that cannot move. Upgrades from the original composite tops to full-slab quartz or Dekton are the bread and butter, and the sink cut-out has to match the existing undermount position exactly. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. 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. The old tops leave in one movement rather than piece by piece.

2010s riverside apartment block, wharf and distillery site redevelopment, concierge tower and riverside townhouse. The room is genuinely square and the units are plumb, so the visit is more about the building than about the kitchen. The room itself is the easy part: walls are plumb, corners are square and the floor is flat, so scribes are minimal and joins can be tight. Everything the last fit ignored is visible for a morning.

Managed estate with a concierge desk, contractor sign-in, insurance checks and a booked goods lift that has to be protected before use. There is a basement car park with a height barrier and a loading bay, and once out of the lift the corridors are long and carpeted, so boards go down before anything is wheeled. Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Every piece is staged to it before fitting starts.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. A date agreed in spring is a hope by autumn. Everything is fixed by the developer's services, so this is a precision replacement job - measure the existing undermount and drainage grooves, do not redesign them.

A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Stone wants gables where laminate needed none. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The awkward metre takes the longest. Supply-only material opens at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line rather than as a single number.

Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Access confirmed rather than assumed. Say what the building is at the booking stage and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice become part of the plan rather than a surprise.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. The way in is walked with a tape before the van is opened.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The strip-out is the part worth planning.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. A thinner top drops the run against the tiles.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The scribe is cut on site or it is not cut.