Kitchen worktops in Dormers Wells

Yes. Interwar semis and estate houses with the kitchen extended into the garden. Practical family layouts with long back-wall runs and tall units, and storage prioritised over showpiece detail. 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 van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. The day is built around that window.

Interwar semi, postwar estate house, 1960s maisonette and recent infill. An ex-council house is solidly built to a standard plan, with the kitchen at the rear and a back door next to it. Carcass heights are read individually, since legs bottoming out on concrete mean the units do not share one plane. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn.

Residential streets with hardstanding on most frontages and easy on-street parking. The Uxbridge Road and Greenford Avenue are where the delays are. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. Door widths, turn diagonals and any change of level are recorded on the drawing alongside the run dimensions. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Worktop installation, worktop replacement and worktop templating, 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. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. One visit, done properly. Rear extensions here are frequently built to the boundary on both sides, so measure the internal door widths carefully because there is no garden route as a fallback.

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. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. One datum for the whole room. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. 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.

Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door, communal or otherwise. One visit, our own installers. 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.