Kitchen worktops in Chelsea

Yes. The Georgian and early Victorian houses off the King's Road are small-boned - low ceilings on the lower ground, timber floors that flex, and kitchens taking 2.6-3.2m of run with a narrow 900mm island at most. Mansion flats on the estate hold their original service plan with the kitchen at the back off a corridor, and a lot of the work is replacing tired timber or laminate on existing units without touching the layout. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

Georgian riverside terrace, early Victorian cottage terrace, Cadogan Estate red-brick mansion block and 1930s purpose-built flats. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Many of the older houses are listed, which rules out taking out a window or a sash to bring stone through, and the front doors are period joinery that nobody will let you unhang. Estate-managed blocks impose their own works hours and require notification to the managing agent, and the King's Road itself has loading restrictions through the day. Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. It sets what the day actually looks like.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation, in that order. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Sound carcasses or it does not go ahead. Listed frontages mean the stone comes through the existing door opening or not at all, so template to the doorway first and the kitchen second.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The join is the last thing finished. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. 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.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Plumber either side of us. 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.