Kitchen worktops in Bloomsbury

Yes. Listed Georgian townhouses split into flats, so kitchens land wherever the conversion put them, commonly a former closet wing or the rear of a larger room with a single 2.4-3m run against an internal wall. Mansion flats have a small fixed kitchen off a central hall and no realistic way to widen it. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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.

Georgian townhouse, listed square terrace, Edwardian mansion block and post-war institutional conversion. Lease conditions and the other flats in the building decide when noisy work can happen, so the fitting day has a start and a finish that are not ours to set. Lath-and-plaster on the party wall and the chimney breast returns almost never runs true, so a 100mm upstand bedded on silicone is the honest answer here, it rides the bow and hides the junction the worktop can never close on its own. Cut from the same slab run as the tops.

Inside the Congestion Charge zone with a Monday to Saturday CPZ and almost no loading bays around the squares, and Euston Road on the northern edge is a red route. Communal Georgian staircases are steep with narrow winders and cannot be marked, so protection and small pieces are the norm. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. It is usually the full-height panels rather than the tops that will not make the turn, and that only shows up when they arrive. It decides panel size before anything is cut.

Worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A day, not a project. Listed communal stairs mean carrying pieces you can hand-turn on a winder, and joins get placed where the client will see them least rather than where the layout suggests.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. A layout templated off one wall instead of one datum will not sit right once all the pieces are down together. One datum for the whole room. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. It is usually what pushes a job towards a 100mm upstand instead of a full-height panel, because an upstand rides what a panel exposes. Make the wall good first, or accept the detail. 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.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Units kept, surface changed. 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.