Kitchen worktops in Soho

Yes. Small flats above bars, restaurants and shops with kitchens under 2.5m of run, often in a room with a sloping ceiling on the top floor. Compact appliances, slimline dishwashers, and worktop depths cut down to 550mm to keep a walkway are routine. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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 drive and a red route make two different fitting days.

18th-century walk-up house, flat above restaurant and warehouse-style conversion. Georgian houses put the kitchen in a basement or a rear closet wing, and the stairs down to it are the tightest part of the whole route. The day is planned backwards from the hall. The slow parts are slow for a reason.

The hardest access in the borough. No parking at all, pedestrianised sections, servicing windows that clash with restaurant deliveries, and 18th-century houses with 700mm doors and steep dogleg stairs with winders and no landing. Night-time economy means the working window is genuinely 8am to lunchtime. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. 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. Out and in happen along the same protected route.

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 void week is the entire schedule. Winder stairs in these old houses mean the maximum piece that will physically turn is often around 1.8m - design the joints for the staircase first and the kitchen second.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Scribed one piece at a time. Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. A filler strip is evidence, not decoration. Material is from £110 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting are each quoted on their own line.

Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. 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. 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.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. One datum for every run in the room.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. The island is set against the perimeter, not a wall.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The stack was boxed in after the kitchen went in.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A plumber either side of us.