Kitchen worktops in Cubitt Town

Yes. Family houses here have a ground-floor kitchen at the rear with a garden door, usually a U or L of 3m to 4m total run, and a fair number have been extended sideways for a small island. Riverside apartments have compact kitchens with the run interrupted by a balcony door. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. 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.

1980s-90s riverside terrace and townhouse, post-war estate and recent riverside apartment. Floor-to-ceiling glazing lights the worktop from one side all day, which shows every ripple in a polished surface and every gap at a scribe. New-build rooms are genuinely square, but they are dot-and-dab plasterboard, and the taped internal angle is where it goes wrong - the board bellies at the corner and the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn.

This is the easiest part of the peninsula for a van, with off-street parking and driveways on many of the 1980s houses and level access to the front door. Riverside blocks are the exception, with gated courtyards and lifts sized for furniture rather than 3m slabs. Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. The template records it along with everything else.

Worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop design & quotation, 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. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. The room as it is, not as it was drawn. Houses here allow a single-piece run straight through the front door, which is worth taking advantage of instead of defaulting to a joint.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Dry-lay first, always. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. 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 someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come. 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.