Kitchen worktops in Gloucester Road

Yes. This is mansion flat territory - kitchens are original service rooms at the rear of the plan facing a light well, typically 2.6-3.2m of run in an L with a butler sink position that has never moved. Refurbishments knock the old maid's room into the kitchen to gain a peninsula, but the load-bearing spine wall usually stays, so the worktop wraps a doorway rather than crossing it. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. The fitting slot is set around it, which is why we ask about it when the date is booked and not before we leave the yard. The day is built around that window.

red-brick and terracotta mansion block, stucco garden square terrace, hotel and serviced apartment conversion and 1930s purpose-built flats. These kitchens are full of boxed soil stacks, gas risers and heating pipework, and the boxing usually stops short of the ceiling. The porter has to be booked, the goods lift protected with the block's own blankets or our own boards, and communal carpet and stair runners covered from the entrance to the flat door before a single piece moves. Walked, measured, protected, then lifted.

Blocks here have a front porter's desk and a separate tradesman's entrance round the side, and materials go in the service lift only, with protective blankets on the walls. The lifts are old, often around 1000mm by 1300mm internally with a low car ceiling, which caps a stood-on-edge slab at roughly 2.2-2.4m unless the stairs are used instead. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation, in that order. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. 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. Old service lifts are the hard limit on this street - if the car will not take it, the joint gets designed around the lift, not around the kitchen.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. The units stay, the surface changes. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. The laser plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. 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.

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. 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.