Kitchen worktops in Foots Cray

Yes. Mixed stock along the river: small older cottages with tight rear kitchens, postwar estate flats with 2.4m galleys, and interwar semis in between. Most work is replacement rather than redesign in rooms that were never large. 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. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb.

Victorian cottage terrace, 1930s semi, postwar council estate and 1960s maisonette. A small room puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on one short length, and the bridge of stone left between them decides whether it can be cut in one piece. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

The main road through is busy and narrow with the river bridge as a pinch point; the estate sections have parking courts and rear pathways and the cottages have no off-street parking at all. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. It sets what the day actually looks like.

Worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop templating, in that order. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Same slab run, or it is not a match. The older cottages near the river have settled floors — level the units off a laser line, not off the floor.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Carcasses have to be sound first. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. It is recorded on the drawing with the run dimensions so the workshop is not guessing. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. 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.

These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Changes cost a piece, not a tweak. 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.