Kitchen worktops in Yeading

Yes. Estate housing with small square kitchens on a two-wall layout, and the boiler and meter cupboards eating into what looks on paper like a usable run. 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. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. One movement off the van starts with how it went on.

Postwar estate house, 1960s maisonette and 1970s low-rise block. The chimney breast in the kitchen served a back boiler behind the living room fire, so the flue is a shared one and the breast is deeper than a fireplace would need. The carry is the constraint. Old fabric gets handled as old fabric.

Estate cul-de-sacs with parking courts, bollarded footpaths and very little turning space, and some blocks are walk-up only. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. Four hands or eight is settled before the tail lift drops.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication, 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 carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Same day, because the void is the whole budget. Meter and boiler cupboards break the run into 1.2m and 900mm pieces, so there are far more joints than the square metre figure suggests.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Offcut sizes are decided before the first cut. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The old top hid it. The drawing will not. Material is from £110 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting are each quoted on their own line.

Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Whoever lives there hears the timing first. If we know the building when you book, the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are worked into the day rather than found on it.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Nothing about it is a discovery on fitting day.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Meters were moved out to a box on the flank wall on a later programme, and the cupboard they came out of is usually still standing in the corner. Deck access or a single narrow staircase with tight half-landings means long pieces get walked up on edge, and the landing turn is checked before we commit. Lath and plaster is not a fixing, and is treated accordingly.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The ceiling is a concrete soffit with a skim on it, so there is nothing to fix into overhead and no void to hide anything in. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. The first hour is protection and packing, not stone.

Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. 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 template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Where the kitchen has been opened into the living room the opening was trimmed with a steel, and a stub of the old wall was left standing at one end. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. Every unit gets a level on it before a piece lands.