Worktop installation in Lewisham

Yes. Lewisham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE13. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of the borough. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. Camera enforcement does not take an explanation. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The addition is one room wide, so the run is a galley with a door at one end and a window at the other and no wall long enough for anything else. The day is planned backwards from the hall. A floor that falls twenty millimetres is packed out first. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Eased in, never forced.

The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Someone stays on the trailing end the whole way in. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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. Forty metres of carry changes the shape of the whole day.

Yes, one of the three we see most, with worktop replacement ahead of it. Same visit to template, same workshop, same installers on the day. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Access is agreed with whoever is still living there. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. A missing sink stops eight kitchens, not one.

Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Levels are checked across the walkway, not along one side. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

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. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. It is the slow part of the day and it should be. Clear the full hall and stairs route of furniture, bikes, coats and stair-gates, and keep the front door propped and unobstructed for the carry. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Communal floors are protected the same as private ones.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. A seam under a rooflight gets the extra minutes.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Nothing is payable in advance of the template. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. A bad floor is corrected under the carcass, never with sealant.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. It adds an hour or two to the day, and that time sits in the schedule rather than being taken out of the finishing. Offered up twice, bonded once.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. Protection down, dry-lay, scribe, then bond: the order matters more in a difficult room than an easy one. The join is polished flat before we call it done.