Worktop installation in Hampton Hill

Yes. Hampton Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW12. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. The fitting slot is set around it, which is why we ask about it when the date is booked and not before we leave the yard. Slack in the day gets spent on the street or on the fit. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen is usually at the back over the rear of the shop, which makes it the furthest point from the street door. Access is generally through the front door and a short straight hall into the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than a Victorian terrace, though rear access through a back garden or shared path is often the better route if it exists. The tops go on level even when nothing else is. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A scribe is a cut. It is not an adjustment.

Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. That is what the morning is planned around. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. A van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. The parking dictates the sequence, not the kitchen.

It is on the short list of three for this patch, with worktop replacement first. Same template, same workshop, same fitters whichever it is. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Back-to-back slots need every flat ready on the first day. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Booked around the turnaround, not our diary.

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. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Steel under the overhang before stone goes near it. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The last hundred millimetres decide how it reads. Unlock any rear or shared path gate and clear both the hall and the back approach so we can choose the better route on the day. 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. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. A void between tenancies has no spare days in it.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. A corner that will not close is never forced.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Pieces are carried in the order they are laid.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A communal flight is out of use while a piece is on it, so the carry is timed so nobody is trying to pass on a half-landing. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. It gets checked before the first piece is lifted.

If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. 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 fitting itself is about squaring up to walls that look modern and are not: block or breeze walls with a skim that has been patched over decades, so we still dry-lay and scribe rather than trust the template edge. What the building will take decides how it is fixed.