Kitchen worktops in Merton Park

Yes. The Arts and Crafts stock has deep plan houses where the kitchen sits behind the dining room, and owners tend to open the two into one long room rather than build out, keeping a run along the outside wall plus a dresser-style block. Cabinetry is usually in-frame timber, so the stone gets a heavier profile and a deeper overhang than a modern slab kitchen. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. We would rather ask than guess.

John Innes Arts and Crafts house, Edwardian villa and 1930s semi. Internal walls are lath and plaster on studs with heavy framing behind, so a fixing finds either nothing at all or something very solid. Access through the property is usually the simplest of any archetype, with wide doors and generous rooms, so we can often carry a full-length piece straight in without a planned join. Movement joints in the shell stay movement joints.

Conservation area rules make skips and long-term van standing awkward, and the estate is characterised by clipped hedges and narrow gated front paths that a two-man carry cannot get a wide slab through squarely. The tram line splits the area, so the approach has to be planned from the right side of the crossing. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. A piece is stood on end only where there is room to turn it.

Worktop installation, in that order. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. A date agreed in spring is a hope by autumn. Rooms here are rarely square, the original walls run out by 20mm or more corner to corner, so template the full room rather than assuming a 90 degree return at the dresser end.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Access is checked against the longest piece first. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Fixings find the studs or they find nothing. Material is quoted supply only from £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are given their own lines rather than one combined figure.

The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Owner or agent, somebody has to be reachable. Tell us what the building is when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are planned in rather than discovered.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. No money is taken before the template happens. Walls that are old, thick and rarely straight make dry-laying and scribing the bulk of the day. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. Suction pads will not hold on a wet or dusty face.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. These are the multi-piece jobs, where vein direction across a join matters as much as the join itself. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. Nothing is cut in the room if the shop could do it.

Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Floors are boards over joists with a solid floor only in the service rooms, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. Getting in is straightforward, so the day is spent dry-laying and scribing to walls that have never been straight. A structure this old is worked with, not corrected.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Dry-lay first, always.