Kitchen worktops in Hale End

Yes. Interwar houses with a rear kitchen of about 2.6m and a rear lobby leading to the garden, usually extended a couple of metres to create a kitchen-diner with a 4m run along one side. Utility space is often carved out of the old lobby with a small matching top. 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. 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. Booking the bay for the whole day is the honest plan.

1930s semi, interwar terrace and post-war infill house. Deep timber window boards were fitted throughout and they stand proud of the plaster, so a top reaching the window meets a stepped edge rather than a flat one. 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. What the last fitter did to the wall shows up on strip-out.

Quiet residential streets close to the forest edge with driveways and lighter parking restrictions, so a van can usually sit outside for the day. Side gates are standard width, so an island slab may still have to come through the house. 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. That is what the morning is planned around.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The void ends whether we have finished or not. Rear extensions here are commonly built to just under 3m internally, which sits awkwardly against standard slab lengths and needs planning to avoid a visible joint.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The strip-out is the part worth planning. 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. Eased in, never forced. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. The signature at the end belongs to somebody with authority. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Ceilings are lath and plaster at the front and plasterboard in the extension, and the join between the two marks where the original back wall stood. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. A sound carcass takes stone; a soft one gets replaced first.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. The consumer unit and the meter often sit high on the wall at one end of the kitchen, and neither of them is going to move to suit a run of stone. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. The wall behind the old top is rarely the wall on the drawing.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. It is the slow part of the day and it should be.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. 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. The hall is parquet or original boards in a good many of these, and it is the surface that takes the traffic for the whole of a fitting day. The recess is measured again once the old top is out, since the original fit was often cut to whatever it found. The units have settled with the floor and get re-levelled.