Worktops in Neasden

Yes. Neasden is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW10, NW2. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. Whatever the standing allows, the stone leaves that van finished, because every edge, cut-out and internal radius is machined at the works and none of it is open to reconsideration at the kerb. The film stays on the face until the last trade leaves. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original quarry-tiled floors sit lower than a later screed, so a run crossing that junction needs the units packed to one level. These kitchens are usually knocked through to the dining room, so the surface is read from two sides at once and the figure has to carry across the pieces rather than restart at every join. Plain stone takes the seam that a long carry forces. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. Every notch and every scribe is machined into the piece before it leaves the works, and a hard sintered surface is the least forgiving of a tight internal corner, so one is always cut with a generous radius. A cut-out beside a notch leaves very little stone in between.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. That caps the longest piece, and a run split into two lengths nests differently on the slab, which moves the yield and moves the figure with it. Yield drops the moment the building dictates awkward lengths. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. A granite kitchen ends its day with a sealer, and a sealer wants a dry face and a quiet hour afterwards, so that hour is written into the day rather than borrowed from it. Four quartz samples arrive by post, well before anything else does.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Where several kitchens are ordered together the sensible move is to take them all off one batch, because two slabs of the same name bought six months apart will not sit happily in the same building. Buying for hard use is a different exercise from buying for looks. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. Volume work tends to live at the entry end of the range, and the entry end is genuine stone rather than a compromise, since the lowest supply figure we quote is a sintered surface and not a thin laminate pretending to be one. The remainder of a slab is bought whether it is fitted or not.

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 shape like that nests kindly on a slab, so more of what gets bought ends up on the units and the rate per square metre behaves much as the brochure says it will. The island is usually the piece that opens the second slab. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. A hob dropped into the middle of a length puts sustained warmth at the lip of a cut-out, and an engineered surface will yellow there across ten years where a natural one takes it without comment. Heat at the lip of an opening is the slow kind of damage. Confirm the depth of the units, the total run lengths and whether an island or peninsula is going in, and tell us the colour temperature of the lighting. 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. That changes which questions are worth asking about the stone, because somebody staying put wants to know how a honed face marks in five years and somebody selling wants to know how it photographs next spring. Sealing is a job somebody has to want to do each year.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. Sintered surfaces are the hardest of the three to machine and the messiest to cut wet, which is precisely why none of that happens on a public pavement. Pieces are unloaded in laying order so the figure runs true.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The consumer unit and the meter often sit high on the wall at one end of the kitchen, and neither of them is going to move to suit a run of stone. The surface is where the money actually moves: across the 181 kitchens fitted the median is £220 per square metre, and half of them land between £165 and £300. Colour gets chosen under kitchen lights, never under showroom ones.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The plaster is a thick float and set over brick that has blown in patches, so a wall sounds solid in one place and hollow a hand-span away. Run lengths are what turn a rate per square metre into a bill, since a slab is bought whole and the part of it nobody uses is paid for all the same. Stone is bought whole and paid for whole, offcut and all.

Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. Where a seam becomes unavoidable the choice of stone starts to matter, because a fine even speckle closes a joint almost invisibly and a broad vein simply will not. Where a break is unavoidable it goes into the quietest part of the pattern.