Kitchen worktops in Kensal Town

Yes. Small estate flats and terraces near the canal and the Great Western line, with kitchens under 2.5m of run and appliances stacked rather than spread. A few canal-side conversions have larger open-plan kitchens with an island, but they are the exception. A shared-use bay allows a paid stay up to a set maximum, and that maximum is routinely shorter than the working day the job needs. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. Both loads want the same few metres of kerb.

post-war estate block, Victorian terrace and canal-side conversion. Edwardian terraces are wider and taller than the Victorian houses next to them, so the kitchen usually takes a full-width rear room rather than a narrow outrigger. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not.

The canal and railway limit through-routes, so several blocks are reached from one side only and the last stretch is a footpath. Estate entrances are fob-controlled with narrow lobby doors and a lift that is often the only one for the whole block. Whether the stone can stand on end in the car is the first question, because a lift that takes 2.1m upright takes nothing like that lying flat. 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. A laminate run comes out easier than stone goes in.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A day, not a project. Where the only route in is a footpath from the road, work out the carrying distance before quoting - it is frequently 80m-plus with a kerb and a ramp.

Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. Vein direction carries up from the top below. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. It is usually what pushes a job towards a 100mm upstand instead of a full-height panel, because an upstand rides what a panel exposes. A tall panel exposes what an upstand forgives. Supply-only material opens at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line rather than as a single number.

Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Sequenced around access rather than around the workshop. Say what the building is at the booking stage and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice become part of the plan rather than a surprise.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Behind an island there is no wall to hide against.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. Upstands follow the run exactly, so every internal and external corner is a separate mitred or butted piece. Socket cut-outs are machined, not chipped in on site.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The rear extension is frequently original rather than added, which means it is solidly built and just as far out of square as the rest of the house. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. The building has kept moving; the new template catches up.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Wider halls make the carry noticeably easier, and that alone can remove a join that a narrower terrace would have forced into the run. What the old top has been hiding is usually a floor that settled towards the back and units that were never fixed back to the wall. What is behind the old splashback decides the new one.