Kitchen worktops in Northwick Park

Yes. Interwar semis alongside purpose-built 1930s flat blocks, where the flats have fixed compact kitchens of around 2.7m against a services wall and cannot be reconfigured. The houses take normal rear extensions, but a large slice of the local work is buy-to-let and short-let refits in the flats with hardwearing, plain material. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Rushing the last piece off the van is how panels break.

1930s semi, 1930s mansion-style flat block and hospital and campus-related accommodation. There is usually a rounded internal corner where the plan turns, and stone does not follow a curve without being cut to it. Mansion block kitchens are full of boxed-in soil stacks, gas risers and heating pipework, and the boxing is usually plywood or plasterboard that stops short of the ceiling, so the splashback run gets broken up by returns rather than running clean wall to wall. The tile bed comes off before anything is measured.

Flat, wide roads with drives on the houses; the flat blocks have communal entrances, half-landings and generally no lift, which limits piece size to what two people can turn on a stair. Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. 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. Where it will not come out whole it comes out in sections.

Worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A day, not a project. Rental refits want the fewest possible visits, so template, fabricate and fit needs sequencing tightly around tenancy change dates.

Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. 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. Scribe to the wall rather than stretch the panel. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. A straight swap is the exception in an older room. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

Inventories record the condition of a kitchen at both ends of a tenancy, which is a practical argument for a surface that looks the same in its fifth year as its first. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Whoever owns the carcasses owns that call. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Nothing changes hands until after the template. The communal stair is stone with a cast iron balustrade, and the winders leave very little room to turn a long piece. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. A chimney breast breaks a panel run regardless of the drawing.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Tall panels are what push a job into a second slab.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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.

Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A void week is the entire schedule.