Kitchen worktops in Tower Hill

Yes. The surviving Georgian houses on the quieter streets are narrow and listed in places, with kitchens at ground or basement of 2.4-3m, sloping floors and no straight walls to work to. Apartment blocks nearby are late twentieth century with conventional galley kitchens of 2.8-3.2m and a peninsula, where the job is usually replacing dated granite with a lighter engineered stone. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. 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. Booking the bay for the whole day is the honest plan.

Georgian terrace on the surviving quiet streets, 1980s-90s apartment block, office conversion flat and modern hotel and residential mixed-use. The window line is a continuous ribbon with structural mullions, so a run under it stops at a mullion rather than at a wall. The work is all in the building, not the kitchen. Nothing goes back on carcasses the building has pulled out of square.

Tourist footfall around the Tower is constant and the surrounding roads carry heavy through traffic with no stopping, so loading has to be on the back streets in an off-peak window. Georgian properties have narrow original doors and steep straight stairs with a tight half-landing, and the listing means no removal of joinery to get a piece through. Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Every piece is staged to it before fitting starts.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Back-to-back slots need every flat ready on the first day. Nothing in the Georgian stock is square or level, so template with a digital arm and expect to scribe every back edge rather than cutting to a drawing.

A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Joins move onto the gables this time round. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A forced back edge cracks weeks later. Supply-only material opens at £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line rather than as a single number.

Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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 signature at the end belongs to somebody with authority. Say what the building is at the booking stage and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice become part of the plan rather than a surprise.

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. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Mark it, lift it, cut it, offer it up again.

A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A communal flight is out of use while a piece is on it, so the carry is timed so nobody is trying to pass on a half-landing. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. The way in is walked with a tape before the van is opened.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. Peninsula tops are often the longest single piece in the kitchen, so if anything in the layout is going to force a second slab it is generally this one. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The return is remeasured even where it looks unchanged.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. Kitchens in these were fitted as a package to a repeating plan, so the carcasses are identical from flat to flat and so are their faults. Housings set out for a 38mm laminate change clearance when you drop to 20mm or 30mm stone, and that is checked before cutting. Units kept, surface changed, one day.