Kitchen worktops in Green Street

Yes. Residential kitchens above the retail parade are long and narrow, fitted along one wall for 2.5m or so, with limited natural light and the flat's only stair coming up beside them. Behind the parade the terraces have conventional rear kitchens serving large families. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. 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.

flat over shop, Edwardian terrace and market-area mixed-use building. Working hours are constrained by the business underneath, so noisy work has a window rather than a day. The units are often 1970s or 80s and only around 500mm deep, so a standard 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors and drawer fronts need checking against it. What is under the old top is the real question.

The shopping street is busy from morning to evening with loading bans and enforcement cameras, so realistically it is an early start or a bank holiday. Access to the flats is through a shared side door between shopfronts, up a single narrow flight with a 90-degree turn, so nothing over about 2.2m gets up in one piece. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. It sets what the day actually looks like.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Above-shop flats mean carrying stone past a live business, so boards down and a planned route matter more than the fit itself.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The units stay, the surface changes. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. The template 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.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. No stone is cut from a plan. 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.