Haydons Road worktops
The kitchens we meet in Haydons Road
Ask three neighbours what they paid for stone worktop supply and fitting in Haydons Road and you will get three answers, all of them correct for the kitchen they were quoting. Dense small terraces where the kitchen occupies the original rear addition and measures barely 1.9m wide, so it is a true galley with units on one side only. A large share are split into upper and lower flats, and the upper flat kitchen is often a former bedroom with a boxed-in stack. We would rather find the awkward corner now than on the day the stone arrives in Haydons Road, so the survey looks at everything.
Party wall settlement pulls the floor down at one side of the room, so a long run reads level at one end and not at the other. Quartz, granite and sintered stone each let you down in a different way, and choosing well is mostly a matter of knowing which of those three failures this room will provoke. Stone is bought whole and paid for whole, offcut and all.
A conversion takes kitchen waste to a stack added to the outside of the building, which fixes the sink position long before anyone draws a layout. Ceilings are tall and the joinery is usually painted, which is the setting where a thirty millimetre edge looks right and a slim one reads as a saving somebody made. A compact kitchen puts the band ahead of the metreage.
The archetypes on this patch are Victorian two-up two-down, Late Victorian terrace and Flat conversion. They are not interchangeable, and a worktop finds the differences quickly.
