Worktop design and quotation in Battersea Park

Yes. Battersea Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW11. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. It sits in the fitting line as time on site rather than as anything to do with the stone. It is one line among the others, and it is honest. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The lift is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a turn at every half-landing. The lift car is the single biggest price driver here. That is what the itemised lines are for. Peninsulas set into a structural opening need the finished opening measured after the steel is cased, because the casing adds 40 to 60mm each side that the architect's drawing ignores.

Mansion blocks have wide communal stairs but many have no lift or only a small original passenger lift, and porters restrict working hours. Flat entrance doors are often original and narrower than the corridor suggests. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. An access-driven join is priced like any other join, and people are always surprised to see one on a dead straight run. You see that figure before we template, not after.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. Comparing quotes only works when they itemise the same things, and this is where the differences usually hide. Itemised, so it can be compared honestly. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Everything is itemised: material, template, fabrication, fitting, each cut-out and each metre of upstand. Material is the slab only, and it says so.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. It is the shape rather than the square metreage that moves the number, which is why two kitchens the same size quote differently. Shape first, area second. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. It is fabrication time rather than material, so it appears on the fabrication line and not in the square metre figure. Priced as fabrication, not as area. Measure the internal lift car, width, depth and height, and photograph the stair turn and landing doors, then send those with the run lengths. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. The quote is written so it can be read by whoever is paying rather than only by whoever is standing in the kitchen. Nothing payable until template.