Kitchen worktops in Kensal Rise

Yes. Similar terraced grid to Queen's Park but with more upper and lower maisonette splits, so a large share of jobs are first-floor kitchens that cannot extend and are limited to a reconfigured 3m L with the sink under the original window. Ground-floor flats with garden access do get the full side-return treatment with an island. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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. Forty metres of carry changes the shape of the whole day.

late Victorian terrace, Edwardian terrace and converted maisonette. The external wall is a concrete panel with a modest window, so the run under it sits in a shallow reveal with a hard cill. The carry is the constraint. Movement joints in the shell stay movement joints.

Streets slope down towards the railway, parking is permit-controlled, and the split maisonettes mean an external or internal stair carry on roughly half the jobs. Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. That is agreed before a plumber is booked.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Shared-house tops take a decade of hard use. Upper maisonettes carry a real weight consideration on old timber joists, so a thick island top is often better replaced with a 20mm slab on a ply substrate.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Packing goes under the units, not under the stone. Once the carcasses are levelled the gap under the plinth varies along the run, and that varying gap is the honest record of what the floor is doing. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The wall has not moved, and neither has the problem. Expect material from £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised on their own lines rather than folded into one figure.

One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Wear is what the next inventory records. Mention the building when you book. The lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice then go into the plan instead of turning up on the day.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. 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. We would rather start at seven than argue with a warden.

Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. The way out is measured with the way in.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. No money changes hands before the template. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. A good number of these blocks are large panel system builds, where the wall is a precast unit with a grouted joint and nothing gets cut into it. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. Dust extraction indoors, or the cut happens outside.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The original units were screwed to timber grounds set into the wall, and where those were torn out the plaster was patched rather than replaced. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. The room is swept and the offcuts leave with us.