Kitchen worktops in Southfields

Yes. The grid of Edwardian terraces has consistent plans with a rear addition that owners widen and lengthen, ending up with a kitchen of roughly 3.4m by 5m holding a long run and a modest island. Many houses are split into upper and lower maisonettes, and the upper one gets a compact L in the old rear bedroom. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. Waste needs a space of its own and the street rarely offers one.

Edwardian terrace, Edwardian semi and Interwar mansion flat. The addition wall is half a brick thick in places and has usually had a damp course injected and been re-plastered, which leaves it neither flat nor consistent. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Tile beds and adhesive come off before the new top goes on.

Permit-only parking across the grid and pressure during the tennis fortnight make timing important, and the roads are too narrow for a van to pass a parked lorry. Upper maisonettes have their own front door and a straight stair with a tight 90 degree turn at the top. Open-tread and cantilevered stairs give nothing to lean a piece against, so the whole weight stays on the crew for the full length of the flight. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. The crew size follows from it.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. 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 fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Access is agreed with whoever is still living there. Upper maisonette stairs in this stock rarely take anything over 2.6m, so upper-flat jobs are planned around a joint from the start.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Level the units first, measure the shape second. 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. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The last hundred millimetres decide how it reads. Material is quoted supply only from £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are given their own lines rather than one combined figure.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Emptying the room belongs to the keyholder, not the crew. Tell us what the building is when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are planned in rather than discovered.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. A timed bay does not cover a strip-out and a fit.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. A twenty-year-old run is replaced to its own shape.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. A single day, planned properly.

Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. A handrail that has to come off before a piece will pass is twenty minutes at the start of the day, and it goes back on the wall before we leave. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. Protection goes down along it first.