Kitchen worktops in Roehampton

Yes. The postwar estate flats have small standardised kitchens, typically 2m by 3m, with services boxed at one end and a fixed sink and cooker position, so refits are straight runs with a return. The older village properties and the cottage estate houses have conventional rear kitchens with more scope for an L or a small peninsula. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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 carry length sets the number of hands on the job.

1950s modernist slab and point block, Interwar cottage estate and Roehampton village Georgian and Victorian. Some of these plans put a bathroom on the ground floor off the kitchen, so a third door opens into a room that already has more doors than wall. Deck access or a single narrow staircase with tight half-landings means long pieces get walked up on edge, and the landing turn is checked before we commit. Carried once, and carried properly.

The slab blocks are set back from the road behind landscaping with long approach paths, controlled entry and lifts that are undersized for stone, and the upper floors make a stair carry impractical. Booked lift access and an early slot are essential. Where a basement car park is the only way up from the parking level the carry starts below ground, and two lifts in one building rarely share the same internal dimensions. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Banisters and door frames are padded before anything moves.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication, 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 fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The last trade in inherits every delay before it. In the tower and slab blocks the lift car depth is the hard limit, anything over about 2m has to be cut to fit the car, so the joint position is decided by the building, not the kitchen.

The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. A thinner top drops the run against the tiles. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Geometry first, then the saw. 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.

Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A locked door costs the day, not an hour. 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.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. A square internal corner is a crack waiting.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Floors are a sand and cement screed over concrete, laid fast and worn since, so they are hard, solid and seldom flat. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. Levelled under the units first.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The rear door has a concrete step and a small canopy over it, and that step is the whole of the difference between the kitchen floor and the garden path. The stairwell half-landing is usually the tightest point on the whole route and it dictates the maximum piece. Old floors get packed, not argued with.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Breakfast bars get the steel they never had.