Worktop installation in Longford

Yes. Longford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB7. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hillingdon. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. 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. Time lost at the kerb never comes back later in the day. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Floors are suspended timber over a shallow void and have moved, so the units are packed and levelled before anything is set on them. The day is planned backwards from the hall. Walked, measured, protected, then lifted. A brick pier standing into the run divides it in two, and the join goes against the pier where a clear wall would have needed no join at all. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A scribe is a cut. It is not an adjustment.

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. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Every piece is staged to it before fitting starts. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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. A drive and a red route make two different fitting days.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop fabrication. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Access is agreed with whoever is still living there. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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.

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. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Support first, stone second. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The last hundred millimetres decide how it reads. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Access rules can differ from one door to the next.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The laying order follows the shape.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. 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.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. If it will not drop in, it goes back out to the saw.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. The way in is walked with a tape before the van is opened.