Kitchen worktops in De Beauvoir Town

Yes. An unusually uniform stock of 1840s villas and semis, so the kitchen is nearly always in the rear half of the ground floor or at garden level, with a rear extension giving an L of about 3.5m and a peninsula. The regularity means the layouts repeat street to street, which is rare anywhere in the three boroughs. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. The day is built around that window.

1840s Italianate villa, Victorian semi-detached house and conversion flat. Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. Victorian party walls and chimney-breast returns bow along their length, so the template plots the real line rather than assuming a straight one - the laser picks up points every few hundred millimetres down the back of the run and the drawing carries that curve through to the saw. No stone is ever cut from a plan.

A conservation area with permit-only parking and filtered junctions closing most through routes, so the streets are quiet but hard to reach directly. Houses are set back with front paths and steps, and the internal halls are reasonably wide by period standards. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation, 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. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. The prep list is not optional. The houses repeat but the rear extensions do not, each one a different depth and squareness, so template every job rather than reusing a previous set of dimensions from the same street.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. Slab yield is worked out at quote stage, so if the layout forces a second slab you hear it before you commit rather than after. Shape first, area second. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the laser plots the intermediate points. It is recorded on the drawing with the run dimensions so the workshop is not guessing. 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.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. 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.