Kitchen worktops in Seething Wells

Yes. Converted waterworks and filter-house apartments with unusual plans - tall windows, exposed brick and steel, and kitchens set as an island-plus-run in a wide open space, alongside plain Victorian terraces along the Portsmouth Road with small rear kitchens. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. A crew waiting for a space is a crew being paid to wait.

Victorian terrace, Victorian waterworks conversion and 1990s riverside flats. Lease conditions and the other flats in the building decide when noisy work can happen, so the fitting day has a start and a finish that are not ours to set. The day is planned backwards from the hall. The building moved decades ago and the fit allows for it.

The river frontage limits approach to one road, and the converted works have gated courtyards, shared stairs and only a handful of visitor bays, so unloading is often 30 to 40 metres from the flat door. Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. 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. It decides whether the old top leaves whole.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A day, not a project. Conversion flats have tall ceilings but narrow original door openings, so the width of a slab on the trolley is what catches you out, not the height.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Access is checked against the longest piece first. A downstand over a run caps wall unit height before it caps anything else, and the splashback then takes its height from the steel rather than from the units. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The laminate was scribed thin. Stone cannot be. Material is from £110 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting are each quoted on their own line.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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. If we know the building when you book, the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are worked into the day rather than found on it.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Dry-lay first, always.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Kitchens in these flats are frequently in what was a bedroom or a return room, so the window is tall and its sill sits close to worktop height. Scribing takes longer than the carry does, so the quiet half of the day is the half that runs over. Nothing is screwed into plasterboard and hoped for.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Encased steel is always bigger than the steel inside it, so the casing is what gets plotted, and a casing is rarely square to the wall it sits against. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. What is behind the old top decides the day.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. A brick pier standing into the run divides it in two, and the join goes against the pier where a clear wall would have needed no join at all. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. The beading was covering a bowed wall.