Kitchen worktops in Woolwich Dockyard

Yes. Small Victorian terraces and low-rise estate housing where the kitchen is the original back room, 2.1m to 2.7m of run, a boiler on the wall and an external door landing in the middle of the best worktop wall. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The yard reads the access note before it racks anything.

Victorian terrace, 1970s low-rise estate and 1980s infill housing. That rear wall carries the back door and the only window, which leaves very little uninterrupted length for a sink run. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Where the floor drops away the front edge is cut to suit.

Narrow streets running down toward the river with parking on both sides and a couple of routes severed by the rail line; short carries, but rarely anywhere legal to stop for long. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. Nothing new comes down a hall still full of old top.

Worktop replacement and worktop fabrication, in that order. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Housings set out for laminate are checked first. Expect to work around a wall-hung combi and a back door, usable run is often a metre shorter than the room suggests.

An aisle under a metre stops being a working space the moment two people are in it, and the depth of the tops either side is what decides whether that happens. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Yield is worked on the slab, not on a calculator. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. It was there long before we were. Material is quoted supply only from £110 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are given their own lines rather than one combined figure.

Method statements, insurance certificates and named operatives are wanted before a crew is cleared to attend, all of which is routine when it is asked for a week out. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Somebody has to own the skip. Tell us what the building is when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are planned in rather than discovered.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. 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. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Cut-outs are set out from the units, not the appliance box.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. The route is protected once and then used four times.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. The return is nested first, because it fits worst.

Order is what matters: a slab is templated before it is cut, so an uncut slab is straightforward and one already machined for another kitchen is not. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A builder-finish kitchen upgrades in a morning.