Kitchen worktops in Hampton Hill

Yes. A high street of Victorian shops and cottages with tight first-floor flats, and behind it Victorian terraces and interwar semis where the kitchen is a rear room of roughly 2.6m by 3.5m, generally refitted in place with an L of 3m and 1.8m. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap.

Victorian terrace, Victorian villa, 1930s semi and modern flats over shops. These flats have been reconfigured more than once, so the kitchen often sits in what was a bedroom with services run a long way to reach it. The units are often 1970s or 80s and only around 500mm deep, so a standard 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors and drawer fronts need checking against it. The units have settled with the floor and get re-levelled.

High Street loading is timed and the parade is busy, so flats above shops mean a street door, a straight steep stair and a right-angle turn at the top; the residential roads behind have driveways and are far easier. Spindles and a newel cap stand proud of the string, so the usable width on a turn is measured to the handrail rather than to the wall behind it. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Someone stays on the trailing end the whole way in.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. A date agreed in spring is a hope by autumn. Flats above the shops have a stair with a tight top landing, so anything over 2.4m has to be jointed - measure the landing, not just the stair width.

One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Joins move onto the gables this time round. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The notch is eased until it drops, then bonded. 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.

One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. The room cleared before the crew arrives. 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.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Doorways are 762mm at best, and the turn from the hall into the kitchen is the pinch point rather than the front door. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. A thicker top changes what clears the top drawer.

The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. Carcasses stay. Surface changes. That is the whole of it. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. The waste run is planned, not improvised.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. The return is remeasured even where it looks unchanged.

The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see.