Worktop installation in Woodford Green

Yes. Woodford Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG8. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Redbridge. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. 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. Everything comes indoors before the loading window closes. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

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. A floor that falls twenty millimetres is packed out first. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. The notch is eased until it drops, then bonded.

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 fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Pieces wait on trestles until the fitters call for them. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. A spotter on the van is a man off the tools.

Often enough. It is one of the three, behind worktop fabrication. The template, the workshop and the installers are the same either way. 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. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. One kitchen out of use, never the whole house. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Plot after plot, the same fitting sequence.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. Two millimetres at the wall is two millimetres you see. 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. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Communal floors are protected the same as private ones.

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. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. It adds an hour or two to the day, and that time sits in the schedule rather than being taken out of the finishing. Nothing bears on plasterboard.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. 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 building moved decades ago and the fit allows for it.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. A deep butler sink and a boiling tap on the same length put two heavy cut-outs within a metre of each other. Getting in is straightforward, so the day is spent dry-laying and scribing to walls that have never been straight. Where the wall bellies, the top is eased in against it.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Original solid floors are quarry tile or flagstone bedded on ash, and they have moved with the ground rather than with the building. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. Access, floor and wall in that order, then stone.