Worktop installation in Ickenham

Yes. Ickenham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. 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. The van does not stay on a main road once it is empty. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The boiler has usually been moved out to the garage or the utility, leaving a capped flue and a run of dead pipework in the kitchen wall. Access is usually the easy part here, as most of these have a side gate and a back door straight into the kitchen, so we carry down the side alley rather than through the house and keep the mess outside. Old floors get packed, not argued with. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. If it will not drop in, it goes back out to the saw.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. The crew size follows from it. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. Time lost at the kerb never comes back later in the day.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop fabrication. 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. A tenant moves in on the date on the contract. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. That family has lived on a building site long enough.

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. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. The last piece in has the least tolerance left. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. Unlock and clear the side gate and back door, and move bins, planters and washing lines out of the alley run. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A cleared crew arrives with its paperwork done.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. Eased in, never forced.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Protection goes down along it first.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. 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. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Access is checked against the longest piece first.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. 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. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Dry-lay first, always.