Worktop installation in Herne Hill

Yes. Herne Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE24. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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. Camera enforcement does not take an explanation. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. What costs time is the distance from where the van can park to the door, often down a long drive or across gravel, so we plan the carry with enough hands and board the route where it crosses gravel or lawn. Old floors get packed, not argued with. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. 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.

Where the hall runs straight through to the back the piece can be walked in flat, and it is only the two door frames that have to be cleared. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Nothing is carried past an obstruction that could have been moved. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. 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. Forty metres of carry changes the shape of the whole day.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Booked around the turnaround, not our diary. 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. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. The prep list is not optional.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Packers go under the carcass, never under the stone. Give us the hardest, shortest approach to the door you can, clear of parked cars, and warn us of any soft ground, steps or gravel on the route. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Access rules can differ from one door to the next.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Lime plaster on nine inch brick has been patched with gypsum wherever a radiator or a socket has moved, and the two finish at different depths. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. Silicone finishes the job; it does not rescue it.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Original joinery is deep and stands proud of the plaster, so the run is plotted to the units rather than to the wall behind them. The carry from where the van can stand to the door is boarded wherever it crosses gravel, grass or a stone floor. The units are shimmed to one datum before stone touches them.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. 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. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. Sealed before we leave.