Kitchen worktops in St James Street

Yes. Small two-bed Victorian terraces with a kitchen in the rear addition of about 2.2m to 2.6m, often with no room for a dishwasher unless the back door is moved. A good number of houses are split into two flats, putting the upper kitchen in a former bedroom with services run on the surface. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. A tall panel and a timed bay is the worst combination here.

Victorian terrace, small converted flat and recent infill apartment. The chimney breast is usually still standing with the opening blocked up, and the alcoves either side of it are rarely the same width as each other. Lath-and-plaster on the party wall and the chimney breast returns almost never runs true, so a 100mm upstand bedded on silicone is the honest answer here, it rides the bow and hides the junction the worktop can never close on its own. The wall gets made good first or the gap shows.

Very tight terraced streets with permit bays on both sides, no crossovers and a nearby industrial estate generating HGV traffic on the through roads. Front doors open straight onto a narrow hall with the stair immediately in front, so pieces come in on edge and pivot at the bottom step. Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. 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. The van stands for both movements, not just the delivery.

Worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A plumber either side of us. These are small tops with a lot of cut-outs in a confined space, so it is a two-piece job more often than the size alone suggests.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. Corners get their own pieces. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The laminate has been covering it up. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one 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. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Disposal is named, not assumed. 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 template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Nothing changes hands until after the template. Suspended timber floors flex underfoot, and anything that moves beneath a unit shows up later as a lipped join. What decides between a slim upstand and full-height stone is nearly always the wall rather than the taste. Height off the units, not off the old tiles.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. The run decides where that joint falls.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Chimney breasts and the alcoves either side of them break the run into short pieces before anyone has drawn a kitchen. Splashbacks come off the same slab run as the tops, which means the decision has to be made before fabrication starts. A bowed wall gets measured at three heights first.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. 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. A laminate run comes out easier than stone goes in.