Kitchen worktops in Wealdstone

Yes. Small Victorian and interwar terraces with rear kitchens barely 2.2m wide, and a large body of new apartments built on the old Kodak and industrial land where kitchens are open-plan single walls with an integrated appliance stack. The terraces get replacement tops in the existing footprint; the new flats get upgrades from builder-grade laminate. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. A panel carried past a live lane gets a second pair of hands.

Victorian workers' terrace, 1930s terrace and recent flats on former industrial land. The staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. Where a client wants a full-height piece behind the hob, it usually sits in the old chimney recess, and that recess is rarely square top to bottom or side to side, so it has to be templated as a trapezium rather than a rectangle. A hundred millimetres covers more than it looks.

Terraced streets with no drives and heavy on-street parking near the High Street, and new blocks with underground parking, height barriers and booked goods lifts. Two completely different loading problems within a few hundred metres. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. Old material is stacked outside rather than left along the route.

Worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Cam-lock carcasses get braced before stone lands. In the small terraces a 600mm deep top will not clear the back door swing, so check whether the door needs rehanging before the stone arrives.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. The panel seam sits over the worktop seam. 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. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. It is the usual surprise, and it is a known one. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

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. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Units stay, so the flat is usable that evening. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. Whether the strip-out is a cut-up job is settled at template.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. A 100mm upstand bedded on silicone is the honest answer where the plaster bows, because it rides what a tall panel exposes. The plaster behind it is the real question.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. Splashbacks are normally the last thing off, so a short parking window is exactly when they get rushed. Nothing this long gets walked while a warden is circling.

There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. External corners are mitred, not butted.