Kitchen worktops in Plaistow

Yes. The standard here is a bay-fronted terrace with the kitchen in the rear addition, around 2.4m along one wall plus a short return, and a separate outside WC that has often been swallowed into the kitchen. Where the side return has been filled in you get a wider room with a 3m run and a small island. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. The carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice.

Victorian and Edwardian bay-fronted terrace, post-war council housing and 1990s infill. Ceilings are high in these, so wall unit heights and splashback heights are open choices rather than things the room has already decided. 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. What is behind the old splashback decides the new one.

Dense terraced streets with front gardens but almost no off-street parking, and permit restrictions during the working day mean a dispensation is usually needed to park across a bay for the fit. Hallways are narrow with a stair rising immediately from the front door, so a 3m piece has to be angled in and walked through on edge. A hall that widens further in is still only as good as its tightest point, and that point is usually within a metre of the front door. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. A carry that needs six hands gets six hands.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. 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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The annexe and the main kitchen go in together. Old outside-WC returns leave a stepped wall in the kitchen, and that step is the single most commonly mis-measured thing in these houses.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Appliance gaps are checked against the new thickness. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Packers go under the carcass, never under the stone. Supply-only material opens at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line rather than as a single number.

Access is arranged through a managing agent or a scheme office rather than with the household directly, so a date gets confirmed once in writing and moving it costs a fortnight. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. The slot belongs to whoever can open the door. Say what the building is at the booking stage and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice become part of the plan rather than a surprise.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. 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. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. One kitchen out of use, never the whole house.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. The bay at the front and the back addition at the rear were built to different standards, and the kitchen is nearly always in the weaker of the two. Carcasses are checked for square and fixed back before a stone top goes on them. A new top on a settled run needs the run corrected first.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. 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. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Nobody sets a worktop down mid-flight to change grip.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. Protection comes up only when the last piece is inside.