Kitchen worktops in Maida Vale

Yes. Mansion-block flats with kitchens at the back of the plan, originally a scullery and larder now combined into one room of roughly 3m by 2.5m. The typical brief is a full refit in the same footprint with a long run under the window and a tall bank opposite - islands do not fit in this plan form. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. The strip-out waits until the new stone has somewhere to stand.

Edwardian red-brick mansion block, Victorian villa and 1930s purpose-built flat. Walls are solid brick with lime plaster and a hard skim over the top, and that skim comes away in sheets when old tiles are taken back. A mansion block is a logistics job before it is a stone job. The wall behind the old top has not been seen in years.

The blocks are portered and run formal house rules - weekday works hours only, no noisy work before 9am or after 5pm, mandatory lift and floor protection, and often a rear service entrance you must use instead of the main hall. The original passenger lifts are small cars with folding gates. Managed buildings allow deliveries through the lift only between set hours, and a day that overruns them finishes with the last piece still on the pavement. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Six flats, six days, one kitchen at a time. Original mansion-block lifts take a person and a toolbox, not a slab - assume everything goes up the stairs and price the labour accordingly.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Breakfast bars get the steel they never had. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Notice periods decide the date more often than the workshop. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. The last hundred millimetres decide how it reads.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. Loading out is loading in, done in reverse and heavier.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. The new pieces are nested, not traced off the old ones.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. The shape is already there to be measured, which makes the template straightforward and leaves the strip-out as the part that actually needs planning. The sink is chosen before the cut list is set.