Worktop installation in Park Langley

Yes. Park Langley is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR3. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Handmade brick and lime plaster move visibly along a run, and a straight-cut back edge shows it immediately. 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. Where the wall bellies, the top is eased in against it. Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. It is the slow part of the day and it should be.

Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Banisters and door frames are padded before anything moves. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. We would rather ask than guess.

It is on the short list of three for this patch, with worktop fabrication first. Same template, same workshop, same fitters whichever it is. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Sealed before we leave. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Consecutive days, one kitchen at a time.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. The laying order follows the shape. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Offered up twice, bonded once. Give us the hardest, shortest approach to the door you can, clear of parked cars, and warn us of any soft ground, steps or gravel on the route. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Access for the whole slot, or a different day.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. A larder, a butler sink and a dresser run put more edges and more cut-outs into the job than the floor area suggests. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. Dust extraction indoors, or the cut happens outside.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Scribed one piece at a time.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The kitchen is nearly always in a later rear or side extension, so half the room is a century older than the other half and the two meet mid-run. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. The room is swept and the offcuts leave with us.

Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. What costs time is the distance from where the van can park to the door, often down a long drive or across gravel, so we plan the carry with enough hands and board the route where it crosses gravel or lawn. The shell has the last word on fitting day.