Kitchen worktops in West Green

Yes. Family terraces around Downhills Park, a good number now extended at the back with a simple flat-roof addition rather than a full side return. That gives a rectangular kitchen with a 3.2m run and a table, or a small peninsula where the old back wall stood. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. The van has to stand through both halves of the day.

Victorian terrace, Edwardian terrace and 1960s low-rise estate. Rear rooms of this date have a wide sash or a pair of garden doors, so a good deal of the wall the run wants is glass. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. What the last fitter did to the wall shows up on strip-out.

Flat streets, which is a relief after Crouch End, but they are narrow with permit bays both sides and speed cushions. Most houses have a side alley shared with the neighbour, gated at the front. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. The opening is measured on the diagonal, not across the frame.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, 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. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Access is agreed with whoever is still living there. Flat-roof rear extensions here often have a shallow lintel over the garden doors - check the head height before planning a tall bank at the end of the run.

Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. A run that flexed under laminate gets support now. 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. 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.

Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Access rules can differ from one door to the next. 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.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. A missing sink stops eight kitchens, not one.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Suspended timber floors flex underfoot, and anything that moves beneath a unit shows up later as a lipped join. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Stone is far heavier than what is coming off.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. Carcasses are checked for square and fixed back before a stone top goes on them. The units have settled with the floor and get re-levelled.

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 join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. The joint where a peninsula meets the main run wants a gable directly under it, and where the units do not offer one, steel goes in to carry that joint instead. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Appliance gaps are checked against the new thickness.