Kitchen worktops in Hammersmith

Yes. Away from the gyratory the stock is standard two-bay Victorian terrace with a rear kitchen, and the common job is a side-return infill giving an L of about 3.4m by 2.4m with an island where the old boundary wall was. Riverside Georgian houses near the bridge are a different animal - small rooms, uneven floors and kitchens of 2.4-2.8m that have to work around original panelling. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The crate spec follows the length of the carry.

Victorian terrace, Georgian riverside terrace by the bridge, 1960s-70s tower and slab block and recent town centre apartment scheme. 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. Lath and plaster is cut for, never cut into.

The gyratory and the flyover approach are red-route controlled with no stopping, so the van goes onto the residential streets and the crew walks the last stretch. Terraced streets here mostly have front gardens with a gate and a step, and the standard route in is the hallway past the stair newel, which is where longer pieces get stopped. A Victorian hall arch sits lower than the ceiling either side of it, and it is the point a piece carried on edge meets first. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Boards go down wherever a loaded trolley has to run.

Worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Tenants are still in the building, so the stairs stay clear. The hall newel post is the usual failure point on a Victorian terrace - offer the template board up the hall before you commit to a single-piece island.

Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Apron mitres are bonded and polished before dispatch. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The alcove piece is dry-laid before the run is. 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.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. The room cleared before the crew arrives. 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.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Seams land over gables, never over a void.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A meter cupboard set into the hall wall narrows the run at exactly the height a carried piece travels. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. A piece is stood on end only where there is room to turn it.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. Packers go under the carcass, never under the stone.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. 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 piece is made for the room the builders left.