Kitchen worktops in Cricklewood

Yes. Edwardian terraces with narrow back-addition kitchens on one side of the Broadway and 1930s mansion blocks on the other, where flats keep a fixed galley of about 2.7m because the risers cannot move. A lot of the terraces are converted into upper and lower maisonettes, so the kitchen is often on the first floor with no possibility of extending. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. The waste run is planned, not improvised.

Edwardian terrace, 1930s mansion block and new-build flats on the Broadway. The lift is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a turn at every half-landing. The lift car is usually too short and too low to take a full-length piece flat or on edge, so stone either goes up the communal stairs with their half-landings and winders, or the run is designed with joins that suit the staircase rather than the kitchen. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

The Broadway is an A road with loading restrictions and bus lanes, so vans park in side streets and the crew carries. Mansion blocks vary wildly, some with a small original lift too shallow for a full slab and a stone staircase as the only alternative. Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. 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. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Same batch, same run, same day. First-floor maisonette kitchens are the recurring headache: the piece has to go up a domestic staircase with a half turn, so plan the joint before quoting a single length.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. Real angles, not plan angles. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The template plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Plotted, not estimated. 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 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Same slab run as the tops. 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.