Kitchen worktops in Munster Village

Yes. A lot of these houses were long ago split into a ground-floor flat with the garden and a first-floor flat with the loft, so you get two small kitchens per address, each around 2.4-3m with a peninsula. The upper flats put the kitchen in a rear addition with a low mono-pitch ceiling, which limits wall-cupboard height and pushes the design toward a longer run and stone upstands. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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.

flat-fronted Victorian terrace, two-storey terrace split into upper and lower flats, flat over shop on Munster Road and small modern infill. The staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Old tops were scribed to a wall that has moved since.

Flat-fronted terraces open straight onto the pavement with no front garden, so you unload directly at the door but you are standing in the footway while you do it - a short window and a spotter is the way. Upper flats are reached by a stair immediately behind the street door with a turn at the top, which is a hard limit around 2.4-2.6m for a piece carried on edge. Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. 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. Both movements are planned as one.

Worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation, in that order. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. One kitchen out of use, never the whole house. Two flats in one house means two small jobs and two sets of stairs - price them as separate installs, not one address.

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. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. A peninsula end takes a panel on both faces. 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. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A bonded mitre goes down on one plane or not at all. Material is from £110 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting are each quoted on their own line.

Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. Communal floors are protected the same as private ones. If we know the building when you book, the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are worked into the day rather than found on it.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The alcove piece is dry-laid before the run is.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. What the last fitter did to the wall shows up on strip-out.

The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Two carries in one day doubles what the distance costs.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. What the old top has been hiding is usually a floor that settled towards the back and units that were never fixed back to the wall. The units have settled with the floor and get re-levelled.