Kitchen worktops in Brompton

Yes. Behind the Brompton Road shopping frontages the houses are deep and narrow with kitchens at lower ground, and many have been extended into a small rear courtyard giving an L of 3.2m by 2m. Flats over the retail parades have kitchens squeezed against a party wall with a lot of pipework boxed in, so the worktop is scribed to boxing rather than to plaster. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

red-brick Victorian terrace, stucco terrace, mansion flat over shop and mews behind the main road. Working hours are constrained by the business underneath, so noisy work has a window rather than a day. Post-war terraces have a fairly shallow, standardised kitchen, and the walls tend to lean rather than bow, so the scribe at worktop height is different from the one at plinth level - the template only cares about the line where the stone will land. Two to three hours, once the units are in.

The main road is a red route with no stopping in the day, so unloading happens on the mews and side streets and the carry-in is on foot through gardens or a shared side passage. Flats above shops are reached by a single narrow street door and a straight steep stair with a hard 90 at the top, which is the piece-length limiter. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. The laser records it along with everything else.

Worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Siliconed to the worktop, never grouted. Scribing is the skill here - decades of boxed-in services mean almost nothing behind a base unit is actually straight or plumb.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The units stay, the surface changes. 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. 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. An upstand rides what a panel exposes. 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.

Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. Splashbacks are cut from the same slab run as the tops, so they have to be decided before fabrication, not after. 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.