Kitchen worktops in Tottenham Green

Yes. Around the Green there are older villas and some period buildings converted to flats, which means high ceilings, deep skirtings and kitchens fitted into rooms that were never kitchens. Layouts are single-run against an internal wall with the services boxed in behind. 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. 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. The carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice.

Georgian villa, Victorian terrace and civic-building conversion. Original walls are thick, lime-plastered and rarely straight, which makes dry-laying and scribing the bulk of the fitting day. Any island overhang past about 300mm will not carry weight on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or brackets have to be let into the units first, and that is agreed at template stage, not on fit day. The units have settled with the floor and get re-levelled.

The Green sits on the High Road with bus lanes and event closures, and several of the converted buildings are listed with restrictions on fixing into original fabric. Communal entrances with a keypad and a hall that must stay clear as a fire route. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. We would sooner lift a gate off its hinges than force a piece past it.

Worktop installation and worktop replacement, 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 fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. A missing sink stops eight kitchens, not one. Deep original skirtings mean the base units stand off the wall - either scribe the top back or set the units forward consistently, but decide before you template or the run steps.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Height change is checked before we cut. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. 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 householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. The slot belongs to whoever can open the door. 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.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. That is what the morning is planned around.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. 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. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Booking the bay for the whole day is the honest plan.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. A range sitting in a chimney recess is common, and the flanking pieces are cut with the manufacturer clearance built into the template. The old island top is frequently sitting on units that were never fixed down, which is fine for laminate and not for stone. Tile beds and adhesive come off before the new top goes on.

Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Eased in, never forced.