Kitchen worktops in Avery Hill

Yes. Interwar semis around the park with standard rear kitchens, plus a stock of low-rise flats and former college accommodation where kitchens are compact single runs under 3m. Extension work is less common than in Eltham; most jobs replace tired units and worktops within the original footprint. 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. Upstands travel in a crate and can wait on the van, which gives some flexibility a full-height panel does not. Handling is where these pieces get damaged.

1930s semi, postwar municipal housing, 1960s low-rise flats and campus conversion housing. Low-rise blocks are three or four storeys with a single stair and no lift, so pieces go up on edge and the half-landing sets the maximum length. Plaster bonded straight onto concrete comes away with the bottom course of tiles, leaving a band behind the upstand. What is under the old top is the real question.

Wide residential roads with verges and drives, plenty of turning room, and quiet park roads outside school run times. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. That is agreed before a plumber is booked.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Sockets final before template. A lot of like-for-like replacements over existing carcasses — check the old units are still level and sound before promising a flat finish.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. Real angles, not plan angles. 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. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The laminate has been covering it up. 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.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. The wall has to be ready. 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.