Kitchen worktops in Bellingham

Yes. Cottage estate housing built to a handful of standard plans: narrow kitchens with a larder recess, back door and fixed sink position, giving 2.1m to 2.6m of usable run unless the dining room wall comes out. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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 waste run is planned, not improvised.

1920s LCC cottage estate, postwar terrace and 1960s low-rise flats. An ex-council house is solidly built to a standard plan, with the kitchen at the rear and a back door next to it. Walls in the system-built blocks are concrete or panel and can bow noticeably over the length of a run, so the template picks up the real line and we cut the back edge to follow it rather than trimming on site with a grinder. Every join over a gable, clear of every cut-out.

Wide estate roads with verges, on-plot parking at many houses and easy turning; rear access is by long shared garden paths rather than side passages. Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating 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. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Nested for the job in front of us. The larder recess and the original back-door position dictate the layout, and the sink almost always stays under the window.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. A layout templated off one wall instead of one datum will not sit right once all the pieces are down together. The drawing leaves site complete. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. One measurement never describes it, which is why a tape reading taken before the visit rarely matches the template. That is why the visit takes two or three hours. 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.

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. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Changes cost a piece, not a tweak. 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.