Kitchen worktops in Ruislip Gardens

Yes. Modest 1930s semis, mostly unextended, where the kitchen and dining room have been opened into one. Straight runs of around 3m with a bay left for a freestanding fridge-freezer. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Nothing gets buried behind something it has to follow off.

1930s semi, interwar terrace and postwar infill. The kitchen sits at the rear with a door to the garden and a window over the sink, so the useful run is broken into two short lengths. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. Tile beds and adhesive come off before the new top goes on.

Quiet residential streets off West End Road with drives on most houses. RAF Northolt and the Central line depot cut off some of the obvious through routes. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Nothing new comes down a hall still full of old top.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication, in that order. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Spares crated with the batch and labelled by unit. Freestanding appliance bays split the run, so what looks like one wall of worktop is actually three separate pieces with two exposed ends to polish.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. A relief that deep changes how the piece is lifted. 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.

The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. A repeated specification comes off one batch. 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. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Cut to the plotted line, not the nominal one.

Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. The mitre is cut to the angle we found, not to ninety.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Scribed one piece at a time.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. The route is protected once and then used four times.