Kitchen worktops in Silvertown

Yes. The 1990s village housing has small enclosed kitchens of about 2.4m that owners open into the dining room for a peninsula, while the newer dockside apartments have open-plan kitchens with an island of 1.6m to 2m facing the water. Warehouse-style conversions have exposed structure and a kitchen set out as a free-standing run. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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 spotter on the van is a man off the tools.

1990s Britannia Village housing, converted industrial building and recent dockside apartment block. These flats are built with a floating floor over a concrete slab for acoustic reasons, and it deflects slightly under the weight of a stone island. 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. Where the wall bellies, the top is eased in against it.

Roads here are wide, industrial in character and largely unrestricted, so a large van can get right up to most buildings, which is unusual for the Docklands. The catch is that new blocks are gated with limited visitor access and single-lift cores, and some plots are only reachable via a long one-way loop round the dock. Once a long piece is in on the diagonal there is no room left for anyone else, so it travels up alone and is met on the landing above. 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. Timing the two carries is most of the planning.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, 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 units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Same day, because the void is the whole budget. Vehicle access is easy but the buildings are not, so the constraint shifts from the street to the lift and the flat's entrance door.

A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Dry-lay first, always. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Found at template, not on fit day. 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.

One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Out and in on the same permission. 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.

The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. A van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. Camera enforcement does not take an explanation.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. The room is cleared for the way out as much as the way in.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Repairable in place beats replaced whole.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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.