Worktop installation in Tulse Hill

Yes. Tulse Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW2. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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 van does not stay on a main road once it is empty. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

These kitchens are big rooms with long perimeter runs and an island, so level has to hold across the whole floor rather than along one wall. Access through the property is usually the simplest of any archetype, with wide doors and generous rooms, so we can often carry a full-length piece straight in without a planned join. Carried once, and carried properly. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. A scribe is a cut. It is not an adjustment.

Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. The crew size follows from it. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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. Time lost at the kerb never comes back later in the day.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Whichever it is, the template and the fitters do not change. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The annexe and the main kitchen go in together. 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. One kitchen out of use, never the whole house.

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. Mitres are pulled together, never pushed. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The last hundred millimetres decide how it reads. Give us the hardest, shortest approach to the door you can, clear of parked cars, and warn us of any soft ground, steps or gravel on the route. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. A locked door costs the day, not an hour.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Nothing changes hands until after the template. Sliding or folding doors take the whole garden wall, so a long stretch of the room has glass where a wall would otherwise carry the units. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. The awkward piece goes in before the easy ones.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. Taking the old tops off and disposing of them is its own line on the quote rather than something folded into the stone price. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. A drive and a red route make two different fitting days.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of 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. If it will not drop in, it goes back out to the saw.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. 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. Levels are checked across the walkway, not along one side.