Kitchen worktops in Green Street

Yes. Residential kitchens above the retail parade are long and narrow, fitted along one wall for 2.5m or so, with limited natural light and the flat's only stair coming up beside them. Behind the parade the terraces have conventional rear kitchens serving large families. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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. Two carries in one day doubles what the distance costs.

flat over shop, Edwardian terrace and market-area mixed-use building. The stair from the street is narrow with a tight turn at the top, which caps piece length well below anything the run itself needs. Post-war terraces have small, roughly square kitchens with a back door and a window in the middle of the run, so runs are short and joins are rare, but there are usually two corners and a window cill to work around in a couple of metres. The wall behind the old top has not been seen in years.

The shopping street is busy from morning to evening with loading bans and enforcement cameras, so realistically it is an early start or a bank holiday. Access to the flats is through a shared side door between shopfronts, up a single narrow flight with a 90-degree turn, so nothing over about 2.2m gets up in one piece. A steep pitch shortens the tread and lengthens the reach, which leaves whoever is below carrying most of the weight for the full flight. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. Joint positions follow from that.

Worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. One conversion drawing repeats its mistakes six times. Above-shop flats mean carrying stone past a live business, so boards down and a planned route matter more than the fit itself.

Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. 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. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. It is usually what pushes a job towards a 100mm upstand instead of a full-height panel, because an upstand rides what a panel exposes. Scribed, dubbed out, or set proud. Pick one. 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.

Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. The wall trade answers to a different budget. 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.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. The structure below is commercial, so the floor is often timber over a shop ceiling and the load path under an island is worth thinking about. Chipboard carcasses under the sink swollen from a slow leak will not take stone and get replaced before fit day. Old tops were scribed to a wall that has moved since.

Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. A stub wall divides the kitchen from the back lobby, and it rarely stayed where the original drawing put it. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Door fronts and drawers get checked against the new thickness.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Joins move onto the gables this time round.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. The shape is already there to be measured, which makes the template straightforward and leaves the strip-out as the part that actually needs planning. The return is remeasured even where it looks unchanged.