Kitchen worktops in Well Hall

Yes. The Progress Estate houses have small, oddly shaped kitchens with sloping ceilings, deep window reveals and non-standard room widths, so units get cut in and the worktop ends up as several short scribed pieces rather than one long run. 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 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. Both loads want the same few metres of kerb.

1915 Progress Estate Arts and Crafts housing, 1930s semi and interwar terrace. There is usually a shared rear alley, and whether the gate onto it is unlocked decides whether long pieces come in from the back. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. A new top on a settled run needs the run corrected first.

A conservation area of narrow lanes, grass verges you should not drive across and very few dropped kerbs; parking is on-street and often a fair distance from the house. The tail lift is still the pinch point, because the piece has to be walked off it onto the trolley while it is sitting at chest height. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. A piece is cut to the turn it has to clear.

Worktop fabrication and worktop replacement, in that order. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Reorderable later, or not specified. Nothing on this estate is a standard depth or a standard angle, template everything and assume no repeat pieces between houses.

Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Same shape, different cut list. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Machined to the real line. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

The decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. A provider specification is cut exactly as written. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Suction lifters need a clean dry face to hold, so in the wet the pads come off and the piece goes back to being carried on webbing by hand. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. The saw never sees a length the hall will not take.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The old larder leaves behind a thick cold shelf and a vent brick through the outer wall, and both have to go before that wall reads flat. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Chipboard carcasses get bracing before stone lands on them.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Nothing changes hands until after the template. Where the side return has been filled in, one side of the new room is old brick and the other is new blockwork, and the two do not behave alike. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. The old cut-outs rarely match where the new appliances go.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Cut oversize on purpose, every time.