Kitchen worktops in World's End

Yes. The estate flats have compact, tightly planned kitchens of roughly 2.0-2.8m with a serving opening to the living room, and the units are shallow with a fixed boiler cupboard in the run. Because the blocks were built as a system, the kitchens repeat almost identically flat to flat, so once you have templated one layout you know what the next one looks like. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. The carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice.

1970s brown-brick estate towers with deck access, Victorian terrace on the King's Road tail, postwar low-rise flats and shop with maisonette over. Where the kitchen is on the entrance level, the piece comes off the deck and turns straight in without going up or down at all. The carry is the constraint. The house sets the order of work.

Vehicles cannot get to most front doors - you park at a designated bay and cross a raised podium and covered walkways on foot, then take a lift that serves several levels of deck. The lifts are narrow with a shallow car depth, so slabs go in on edge and anything over about 2.4m needs the stair, and the stairs are dog-leg concrete with steel handrails at shoulder height. Lift doors close on a timer that takes no account of somebody holding a worktop, so a pair of hands stays on the buttons at each end. 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.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. One kitchen out of use, never the whole house. Repeatable layouts but a brutal carry - the podium walk plus a shallow lift car is why pieces here get jointed at the hob even when they would technically fit the kitchen.

Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Any overhang gets underpinned first. Encased steel is always bigger than the steel inside it, so the casing is what gets plotted, and a casing is rarely square to the wall it sits against. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. The overhang is checked again once the feet are set. Material runs from £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines rather than rolled into one figure.

Residents are given written notice before anyone attends, and that notice period rather than the workshop is what governs the earliest sensible start. The fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Scheme rules on working hours are checked first. Tell us the building when you book and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice get built into the day rather than found on it.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. The shape is measured again, not copied off the old top.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. The shape is already there to be measured, which makes the template straightforward and leaves the strip-out as the part that actually needs planning. Laminate hides what the gables are really doing.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. A service duct runs between the kitchen and the bathroom stacked above it, and access to that duct stays open whatever the layout does. The stairwell half-landing is usually the tightest point on the whole route and it dictates the maximum piece. Levelled first, then set, then sealed.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. The external wall is a concrete panel with a modest window, so the run under it sits in a shallow reveal with a hard cill. Fixings into concrete go in with proper anchors, and the dust is contained rather than swept up afterwards. Carried once, and carried properly.