Kitchen worktops in East Barnet

Yes. Interwar suburbia around the village, where the standard job is a rear extension with bifolds giving an open kitchen-diner, a 4m run under a roof light and an island of about 2.4m. Utilities are usually squeezed into a side return or the old kitchen doorway rather than being purpose-built. 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. 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.

1930s semi, 1930s detached and post-war maisonette. A detached house of this age has a drive, a side path and a back door, so access is rarely the constraint and the design can follow the room. The typical 1930s kitchen sits at the back with a low window over the sink run, so the template records the exact sill height above the units to settle whether an upstand fits or the stone has to die into a window board. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn.

Wide residential roads with dropped kerbs and drives, decent side gates, and the valley of the brook meaning some roads dip steeply; the village centre itself has short-stay parking only. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. The template records it along with everything else.

Worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop design & quotation, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. The prep list is not optional. New extensions here are often templated too early, before the floor screed has been laid, and the resulting unit height change is the commonest cause of a remake.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. Each run is priced on its own line against the supply rate, with the join count and the reason for each join stated. Shape first, area second. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. It is fabrication time rather than material, so it appears on the fabrication line and not in the square metre figure. Priced as fabrication, not as area. 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 fitting day is arranged with whoever can actually give us access for the whole slot. Access for the whole slot, or a different day. 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.