Kitchen worktops in Sidcup

Yes. A wider range than the rest of Bexley: Edwardian and interwar detached houses with large kitchen-breakfast rooms and islands, plus town-centre and retirement flats with compact 2.4m runs. The bigger houses take 4m-plus runs and a separate utility. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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 parking dictates the sequence, not the kitchen.

Edwardian villa, 1930s semi and detached, 1960s flats and 2010s town-centre apartment block. The room is wide enough that an island turns up in nearly every scheme, and how far the drainage can be taken is what fixes where it sits. Access is usually the easy part here, as most of these have a side gate and a back door straight into the kitchen, so we carry down the side alley rather than through the house and keep the mess outside. Fixings go into what the wall actually is.

The High Street and the main road junction are congested with limited loading, but the residential roads have generous drives; the apartment blocks near the station have controlled parking and a lift. The lift is only part of the route, and the corridor from the lobby to the flat door often holds a tighter turn than the car does. 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.

Worktop installation, 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. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Plot after plot, the same fitting sequence. Two different jobs in one postcode, a detached-house island in one piece, and a lift-restricted flat run in three.

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. Dry-lay first, always. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside 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. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. Protection goes down first. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Ceilings are lath and plaster at the front and plasterboard in the extension, and the join between the two marks where the original back wall stood. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. A settled floor adds an hour and the day allows for it.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The consumer unit and the meter often sit high on the wall at one end of the kitchen, and neither of them is going to move to suit a run of stone. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. Door fronts and stone edges get checked against each other first.

Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. Nothing bears on plasterboard.

Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. 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. Nothing is bonded until the whole run sits flat.