Kitchen worktops in Royal Albert Wharf

Yes. All recent stock, so kitchens are open-plan with a 2.6m to 3m run of handleless units and a compact peninsula, sized to a modern flat rather than a family house. Replacement work is mostly owners upgrading a builder-grade top or repairing a chipped composite around the sink. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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. Everything comes indoors before the loading window closes.

2016 onwards apartment block and waterside townhouse. Floor-to-ceiling glazing lights the worktop from one side all day, which shows every ripple in a polished surface and every gap at a scribe. Everything comes up in the lift, so we measure the lift car's internal diagonal before the piece is loaded, because a car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a 3m worktop no matter how you stand it. Fixings go into what the wall actually is.

The development sits at the end of a long approach past the dock with limited through-traffic, so allow travel time but expect a clear road at the end of it. Service access is through a courtyard with bollards and a small number of shared lifts serving several cores, which means a booking and often a wait. Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Four hands or eight is settled before the tail lift drops.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. 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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. One kitchen out of use, never the whole house. Shared lifts across multiple cores make this a slow building to work in, so allow a longer window than the fit itself needs.

Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. 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. Behind an island there is no wall to hide against. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see. 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.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. One day out of use, agreed in advance. 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.

Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A partition that gives when you lean on it will give under someone sitting at an overhang, and a bonded mitre nearby is where that movement shows first. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Nothing bears on plasterboard.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Handrails, mirrors and a sloping ceiling panel all eat into the usable diagonal, and none of them appear on a lift specification sheet. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Suction pads go on once the face is clean and dry, not before.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Open-plan living makes the kitchen furniture rather than utility, so the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab. If the diagonal is short we either split the run with a planned join or, on lower floors, carry up the stairwell, which needs the half-landing turn checking as well. Soft brick takes a different plug to blockwork.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. The awkward corner goes in first, not last.