Kitchen worktops in Tollington

Yes. Mid-sized Victorian terraces, many still whole houses, where the kitchen occupies the rear addition and the usual improvement is a knock-through to the dining room. That gives an L of 3.5-4m with a peninsula at the knock-through point rather than a central island. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. Old stone is heavier going out than it looked coming in.

Victorian terrace, Edwardian terrace, conversion flat and post-war block. The rear wall is usually a single brick thick and has been rendered, patched and re-rendered, so it bows in and out along the length of the run. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not.

The streets between Hornsey Road and Seven Sisters Road are narrow, one-way in places and permit-only, while the main roads either side carry buses with loading limits. Straight halls with a rear door make the carry manageable once the van is parked. Boxed-in pipework running along the skirting looks harmless until a loaded trolley has to pass it. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. That is what the morning is planned around.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, in that order. Small kitchens in a shared house are all short runs and tight cut-out spacing, which is more bench work per square metre than one large kitchen would be. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Book us when the units exist, not when they are ordered. A knock-through joins two rooms with different ceiling heights and wall finishes, so batch-match the slabs and set your level off the longer span rather than the shorter one.

One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. A corner that was butted can be mitred this time. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. Expect material from £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised on their own lines rather than folded into one figure.

Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. The signature at the end belongs to somebody with authority. Mention the building when you book. The lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice then go into the plan instead of turning up on the day.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Gas, waste and later wiring were boxed in against the wall long after the house was built, and that boxing is what the run has to clear. 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 single day, planned properly.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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. The van has to stand through both halves of the day.

A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for the day. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. It gets checked before the first piece is lifted.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Old runs are rarely square, and stone will not forgive it.