Worktop installation in Upper Clapton

Yes. Upper Clapton is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E5. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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. It is why the arrival time is what it is. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The kitchen is generally a rear extension or a knocked-through pair of rooms, so part of the perimeter is old wall and part of it is new. 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. Old floors get packed, not argued with. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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.

There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Boards go down wherever a loaded trolley has to run. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. The day is built around that window.

One of the three we are asked for most, although worktop replacement is asked for more. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. Four kitchens ordered together take one template visit and one delivery, and that is where the saving comes from rather than from a discount on the stone. 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. Rooms in a shared house are let individually, so the work has to be done around whoever is still living in the building. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Handover day is a hard stop.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Mitres are pulled together, never pushed. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. Quartz is the sensible default in a rental: nothing to seal, nothing to maintain, and nothing an incoming tenant needs briefing on. 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.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. If it will not drop in, it goes back out to the saw.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. There is a door to the garden, a door to the hall and often a door to a utility, so the perimeter run is interrupted three times. What costs time is the distance from where the van can park to the door, often down a long drive or across gravel, so we plan the carry with enough hands and board the route where it crosses gravel or lawn. The units are shimmed to one datum before stone touches them.

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. 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. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. Levels are checked across the walkway, not along one side.

Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. A landlord ordering several kitchens at once is buying a specification once and then repeating it, so the early decisions are worth taking slowly. Fitting is booked as a run of consecutive days rather than as separate visits, which is what makes several kitchens in one building workable. The annexe and the main kitchen go in together.