Worktop installation in St Luke's

Yes. St Luke's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC1V. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Inter-war purpose-built blocks have curved external walls and steel windows, so a run along an outside wall is following a genuine curve rather than a bow. This is the most managed day we do. One datum, taken off the highest point of the floor. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Level is checked across the room, not along one wall.

The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Nothing is carried past an obstruction that could have been moved. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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. Where there is no space, the plan starts the night before.

Yes, one of the three we see most, with worktop replacement ahead of it. Same visit to template, same workshop, same installers on the day. 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 fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. A shared house stays occupied while we work in it. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Fire doors stay shut, so the carry route is longer.

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. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Pieces are carried in the order they are laid. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. The notch is eased until it drops, then bonded. Have the works booking confirmed with the managing agent or porter in advance, with the lift slot and any parking permit or bay suspension in place. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Booked around the tenant, not around the owner.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. It adds an hour or two to the day, and that time sits in the schedule rather than being taken out of the finishing. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. 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. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The return is offered up last.

An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. The hall is cleared before the first piece comes off the trolley.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Mitres are pulled together, never pushed.