Kitchen worktops in Canons Park

Yes. Well-proportioned interwar houses laid out around the park with kitchens usually extended once, giving a 3.6m run plus a modest island, alongside 1930s low-rise flat blocks with original small kitchens that are being modernised without moving the plumbing. Utility rooms appear in the houses, never in the flats. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Handling is where these pieces get damaged.

1930s semi and detached, 1930s purpose-built flat block and post-war infill. These blocks were built with a lift from new, which will usually take a worktop and almost never takes a full-length island piece. This is the most managed day we do. Walked, measured, protected, then lifted.

Wide roads with verges and drives on the houses, and the flat blocks have generous communal entrances but low-headroom stairwells that decide how a slab is turned. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. That is what the morning is planned around.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. One visit, done properly. In the 1930s blocks the kitchen window sits low and the original tiled splashback is bedded thick, so allow for hacking off before the upstand can sit flush.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Carcasses have to be sound first. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The laminate has been covering it up. 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. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. Access for the whole slot, or a different day. 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.