Worktop installation in Manor House

Yes. Manor House is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N4. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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. Forty metres of carry changes the shape of the whole day. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A long piece has to come through the front door, down the hall, round the newel post and through a doorway with a step down into the addition. The day is planned backwards from the hall. The building moved decades ago and the fit allows for it. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Eased in, never forced.

Car depth is the number that settles it wherever a piece cannot be stood upright, and most residential cars are shallower than the run they are serving. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. The last piece off the van is the first one fitted. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. We would rather start at seven than argue with a warden.

One of the three we are asked for most, although worktop replacement is asked for more. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Lease hours decide when the noisy part happens. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. A tenant moves in on the date on the contract.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A cleared crew arrives with its paperwork done.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The addition wall is half a brick thick in places and has usually had a damp course injected and been re-plastered, which leaves it neither flat nor consistent. 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.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. A car ceiling at 2.2m sets the tallest thing that will stand in it, and the trap panel and light fitting take a slice off even that. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. A carry that needs six hands gets six hands.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. Fitting is booked as a run of consecutive days rather than as separate visits, which is what makes several kitchens in one building workable. That family has lived on a building site long enough.