Kitchen worktops in Millwall

Yes. Waterside flats around the inner dock typically have a galley kitchen of 2.4m to 3m running off the hall, closed on both sides, with the living room kept for the dock view. Some larger units have been opened up, which produces one long run plus an island squeezed against a structural column. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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. The day is built around that window.

1980s dock-edge low-rise, 1990s-2000s waterside apartment block and recent high-rise. A balcony door is the only other opening in the flat and it leads nowhere useful, so everything comes in through the front door. The lift is measured before the piece is loaded, and once inside the flat the fitting is quick by comparison. The slow parts are slow for a reason.

Blocks sit around the dock edge with restricted vehicle access to the water side, meaning the van parks at the road frontage and the slab is walked round the dock path. Many buildings are gated with a single narrow lift and a step-up threshold at the lobby door. A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The route is protected once and then used four times.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A day, not a project. Structural columns in the middle of opened-up flats are common, and a top that has to notch round one needs the column dimensions taken at template, not from a plan.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Access is checked against the longest piece first. A downstand over a run caps wall unit height before it caps anything else, and the splashback then takes its height from the steel rather than from the units. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The wall has not moved, and neither has the problem. 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.

Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Owners phase this work; a void period cannot. 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.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. We would rather ask than guess.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. A stone top coming out whole needs the same crew as one going in.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Dry-lay first, always.

Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Encased steel is always bigger than the steel inside it, so the casing is what gets plotted, and a casing is rarely square to the wall it sits against. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Packing the carcasses is part of the replacement.