Kitchen worktops in St Paul's

Yes. The handful of residential flats here sit above shops and offices in postwar and modern blocks, so kitchens are compact open-plan arrangements of 2.6-3.2m with an integrated appliance stack and no room for an island. Ceiling voids carry a lot of services, which means bulkheads over the run and wall cupboards that stop short - stone upstands and a full-height splashback fill the gap neatly. 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. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. A narrow gap between parked cars decides how a panel turns.

postwar reconstruction block with flats above, modern apartment over retail, 1960s-80s commercial building converted to residential and small conversion flat. Handover kitchens are fitted with the cheapest carcass the specification allowed, and cam-lock chipboard boxes are what a stone top has to sit on. The room itself is the easy part: walls are plumb, corners are square and the floor is flat, so scribes are minimal and joins can be tight. Chipboard that has taken water will not take stone.

The immediate cathedral surroundings are pedestrianised with bollards and stepped paving, so the van stops on a permitted street and the last 100m or more is on foot across paving that is unkind to a trolley. Service access to residential floors is usually shared with the commercial tenants and restricted to outside their delivery hours. The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. 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 old top leaves by the route the new one arrives on.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Cut now, stored for the next void. Stepped and setted paving around the cathedral will jar a trolley badly, so carry the last stretch on a frame rather than wheeling it over the flags.

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. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. One datum for every run in the room. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Packing the carcasses is part of the replacement. 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.

Where the owner is not local, the decisions happen remotely, so photographs and a clear itemised drawing carry more weight than a showroom visit ever would. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Same slab run, so it is settled at drawing stage. 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.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. 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. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The laminate has been covering it up.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. 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. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Found at template, not on fit day.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Underfloor heating in the screed means nothing is fixed into the floor, so an island is anchored to the carcasses alone. The work is all in the building, not the kitchen. The floor has dropped since the kitchen went in.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. 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. 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 island is set against the perimeter, not a wall.