Worktop installation in Hayes End

Yes. Hayes End is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB4. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. 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. The parking dictates the sequence, not the kitchen. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The original room is timber over a ventilated void and the newer half is a slab, so the floor gives underfoot on one side of the junction and not on the other. The fitting itself is slower than the carry: original plaster on the party wall and around the old chimney breast is rarely square to the run, so back scribes get cut on site, and where a return wraps into a breast recess we template that shoulder tight and ease it in. The shell has the last word on fitting day. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Eased in, never forced.

Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. It gets checked before the first piece is lifted. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. 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. Where there is no space, the plan starts the night before.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed. 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. One kitchen out of use, never the whole house. 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. Plot after plot, the same fitting sequence.

Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. A galley is levelled as one plane, both sides together. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

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. 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. Unlock and clear the side gate and back door, and move bins, planters and washing lines out of the alley run. Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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. Access rules can differ from one door to the next.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. 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. Offered up twice, bonded once.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. It adds an hour or two to the day, and that time sits in the schedule rather than being taken out of the finishing. Sealant seals. It does not fit.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. 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. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The last piece in has the least tolerance left.

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. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Plaster in the older half is a sand and cement backing on brick while the newer half is board on dabs, so the same fixing bites in one wall and breaks through the other. The carry is the easy part; the plaster around the old breast and the packing over a moved floor are not. Lath and plaster is not a fixing, and is treated accordingly.