Kitchen worktops in Ravenscourt Park

Yes. Big terraces around the park take double side-return extensions with kitchen islands of 3m and a separate utility, and a lot of them go for full-height stone splashbacks behind a range because the rear wall is glazed and the cooking wall is the only solid one. The villa conversions are the counterpoint - first-floor flats with a galley of 2.4-3m squeezed into a former bedroom and a joist run that will not take much extra load. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Loaded for the carry, not for the van.

large Victorian terrace and semi, Edwardian villa, purpose-built interwar flats and conversion flat in a former villa. Original walls are thick, lime-plastered and rarely straight, which makes dry-laying and scribing the bulk of the fitting day. Access is off a drive and through wide doors, so for once the piece size is not the constraint - the joins that go in are the ones we choose for layout and veining, not the ones the building forces. A scribe of twenty millimetres is machined, not fettled on site.

Streets are wide with plane trees and permit bays, but the District line viaduct and the park perimeter cut through the grid so approach routes are longer than the map suggests. Conversion flats have a shared front door, a straight run of stairs and a landing that is often under 1m wide, which is the practical piece-length ceiling. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. 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. Cutting a top down indoors means emptying the room first.

Worktop fabrication and worktop replacement, in that order. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Nothing else in the room has to change. In first-floor conversions check the joists before you fit 30mm granite on a long island - old timber floors here flex enough to open a joint.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The overhang is cut with its support already sized. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. It is the usual surprise, and it is a known one. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Units stay, so the flat is usable that evening. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. Out and in happen along the same protected route.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. A range sitting in a chimney recess is common, and the flanking pieces are cut with the manufacturer clearance built into the template. The joins here are chosen rather than forced, so they go where the veining and the gables want them. Older houses come off the bench with longer scribes.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. It was there long before we were.

Thickness has to be known before quoting, since it decides the edge, the cut-outs and what the units carry. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A day, not a project.