Kitchen worktops in Shooters Hill

Yes. Large detached and semi-detached houses on the higher ground with proper kitchen-breakfast rooms, usually extended into the garden, 4m runs and full islands are normal, and there is often a separate utility with its own worktop. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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.

Victorian villa, Edwardian detached, 1930s semi and postwar estate. These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. Access through the property is usually the simplest of any archetype, with wide doors and generous rooms, so we can often carry a full-length piece straight in without a planned join. The slow parts are slow for a reason.

The gradient defines everything: long sloping drives, houses set well above the road behind steps, and a fast main road up the hill with nowhere safe to unload on the bends. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Nesting follows the route, not the other way round.

Worktop installation and worktop fabrication, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Proven on the bench before dispatch. Plenty of room inside, but the approach is uphill and often over gravel, bring a proper A-frame rather than trusting a barrow.

Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Dry-lay first, always. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The casing gets plotted. The steel inside it does not. 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.

Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. An agent forwarding a drawing is not approving it. 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.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Nested for the job in front of us.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The piece is nested around the scribe, not despite it.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The crate is built to the same measurement.

The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. 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. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. A piece is cut to the turn it has to clear.