Worktop design and quotation in Cheapside

Yes. Cheapside is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2V. It is worked on our the City run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. Tell us at enquiry stage and it is priced properly, because a crew stood waiting is the most expensive thing on any job. Nothing here is added after the fact. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The flat entrance door and the internal doorways are usually tighter than the communal stairs, which is the opposite of what most people assume. The second thing is the carry route: front door, narrow hall, a turn at the stairs and often a step down into the extension, which can mean a piece that would template in one length has to be split to physically get into the room. That is what the itemised lines are for. Overhangs on these breakfast bars need steel flat bar, not faith - 30mm quartz unsupported past about 300mm will crack at the sink corner sooner or later.

Cheapside itself has bus lanes and daytime loading restrictions, and the residential entrances are usually a discreet side door off a neighbouring lane rather than on the main frontage. Retail servicing takes priority in the shared basement bays, so residential deliveries get an off-peak slot, generally mid-morning or after the shops shut. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. We price the carry from what you tell us about the route, so photographs of the approach are worth more to us than a floor plan. It appears as its own line rather than buried in a rate.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Batching several kitchens together is the one situation where buying a whole slab is cheaper per kitchen rather than more expensive. Everything is itemised: material, template, fabrication, fitting, each cut-out and each metre of upstand. Itemised, so it can be compared honestly. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Material is the slab only, and it says so.

A peninsula is an island with one end tied to a run, which means the join between them has to be planned rather than allowed to happen. Each run is priced on its own line against the supply rate, with the join count and the reason for each join stated. Shape first, area second. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. Send photographs of every corner of the room and it gets priced properly first time. Better on the quote than in a variation. Send us the run lengths, plus photos taken walking from the pavement through the hall to the kitchen so we can see the door widths and the stair turn. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. Nothing is payable until we template, so a quote can sit while consents and decisions catch up. Every line has a reason next to it.