Kitchen worktops in Hornchurch

Yes. The bulk of the stock is inter-war semis with the kitchen and dining room knocked together into an L, plus a rear extension on maybe half of them, giving a 3-4m main run with the sink under the original rear window. Above the High Street there are flats with small galley kitchens where the whole run is under 3m and every millimetre of the return matters. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. 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. A skip on the frontage takes the space the van needed.

1930s semi, inter-war terrace, post-war semi and town-centre flat. The windows were steel to begin with and have been swapped for plastic in openings lined out to suit, so the reveal is now deeper than the brickwork behind it. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. Same units, straighter line, better surface.

Residential roads are easy with dropped kerbs and side gates, but the High Street and Station Lane flats have loading restrictions, timed bays and first-floor stair access with a tight turn. A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Fire doors stay shut, so the carry route is longer. Half the borough's semis have the sink stuck under a low rear window, so we check the sill height before specifying an upstand, often there is not enough room for one.

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. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. A run that flexed under laminate gets support now. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Packers go under the carcass, never under the stone. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

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. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The extension slab was poured to its own level, so there is a lip or a ramp where the new floor meets the original one. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Nothing new goes down until the run reads level end to end.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. 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. Appliance gaps are checked against the new thickness.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. The waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Rear extensions on these sit on shallow foundations, and the crack at the junction with the original wall tells you which way it has moved. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. How old the kitchen is decides how long preparation takes.