Worktop installation in Longbridge

Yes. Longbridge is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG11. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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. A booked bay only helps if it is empty when we arrive. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The kitchen occupies the ground floor of the addition with a garden door at the far end, so there is a second way in that is narrower than the front door and a great deal shorter. Scribing takes longer than the carry does, so the quiet half of the day is the half that runs over. Nothing is screwed into plasterboard and hoped for. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. It is the slow part of the day and it should be.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Boards go down wherever a loaded trolley has to run. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. The clock on the bay runs whether the lift is free or not.

It is inside the three we do most here, under worktop replacement. Either way: same template, same workshop, same fitters. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The building keeps working around us. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. A slipped slot takes the next one with it.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Support first, stone second. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Offered up twice, bonded once. 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. 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 half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. Access rules can differ from one door to the next.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. Two men and a long carry is a different day from two men and a drive, and the crew is sized on that. Slack in the day gets spent on the street or on the fit.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. A piece is stood on end only where there is room to turn it.

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. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. The laying order follows the shape.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The kitchen normally sits in the back addition or a later side return, which puts the run against the oldest and least straight wall in the building. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. The join is polished flat before we call it done.