Kitchen worktops in Brimsdown

Yes. Interwar terraces and semis where the standard job is knocking the small kitchen into the back reception to make a kitchen-diner, giving a 3.6m run along one wall and a table at the far end. Islands rarely fit - the rooms are long and narrow rather than square. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. The day is built around that window.

interwar terrace, 1950s semi and light-industrial conversion. A side alley and a back door mean most pieces go in whole, and it is the alley width rather than the front door that decides it. These are typically two runs and a return, often into a rear extension, and the return piece is the awkward one — short, wide and rarely nesting well against the long pieces on the slab, so slab yield rather than total area is what pushes the material line up. Priced from the building, not from a rate card.

Easiest access in the borough. Wide roads built for the industrial estate, verge parking, and most houses have a driveway or a dropped kerb, so the van can back up close to the door. 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. That is why the fitting line on a quote reflects manpower and time rather than square metres. Nothing about it gets estimated after the fact.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A day, not a project. When the old dividing wall comes out you are left with a nib and a beam - agree whether the worktop dies into the nib or runs past it before templating, it changes the joint position.

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. 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. 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. Better on the quote than in a variation. 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.

An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. Material is quoted as a supply range and the labour lines separately, because an installed rate per square metre is not a real number. Nothing payable until template. 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.