Kitchen worktops in Ickenham

Yes. Substantial detached houses with large square kitchens built around a freestanding range cooker, big islands with 40mm or mitred 100mm edges, and a fair amount of full design-led remodelling rather than replacement. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The strapping answers to the walk, not the drive.

1930s Metroland detached, interwar semi, village conservation area cottage and Swakeleys estate house. Air bricks that once ventilated the original floor now open into the extension, and one of them is generally sitting behind a base unit. Most of these have a side passage and a back door, so a full-length piece can usually reach the kitchen without being cut down, and the piece sizing is driven by the slab rather than the route. The shell decides the piece; the slab decides only the yield.

The village core around the pond is conservation-controlled and narrow, but the surrounding estates have wide drives with room to turn. Low bridges on the Metropolitan line approach catch out taller vehicles. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. The way in is agreed before the crew is booked, not after.

Worktop installation and worktop fabrication, in that order. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Fire doors stay shut, so the carry route is longer. Range cookers dictate the aperture, so measure the appliance itself and hold a 3mm gap each side rather than trusting the manufacturer's spec sheet.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The saw follows the nest, not the floor plan. 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. Nothing bears on plasterboard. 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.

The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. 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.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. These kitchens have usually been retiled twice and knocked through once, and both of those leave marks the worktop has to deal with. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Yield is worked out against the run lengths the house allows.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The original plan put a larder and a back door on the same wall, and both leave awkward stubs once the room is opened up. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. A short piece is cut short on purpose.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Book-matched pieces are cut adjacent or not at all.

Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Downstairs the hall and dining room are boarded but the kitchen was laid solid from the start, so the room sits on a different construction from the one beside it. What does drive the bench work is the knocked-through kitchen-diner: the return worktop and any peninsula are seen end-on from the dining side, so we nest the pieces so the veining carries across the internal corner in the same direction rather than turning through ninety degrees. Walls out of plumb are cut for at the bench.