Kitchen worktops in Gunnersbury

Yes. Mostly flats. Compact L-shapes of 2.4m to 3m with integrated appliances and a peninsula at best, plus older purpose-built blocks where the kitchen is still the original service room with a pantry recess. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Handling is where these pieces get damaged.

Victorian terrace, 1930s purpose-built flat and 2010s-2020s station-side tower. These blocks were built with a lift from new, which will usually take a worktop and almost never takes a full-length island piece. A mansion block is a logistics job before it is a stone job. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Delivery itself is easy with the Chiswick roundabout and North Circular right there, but the newer blocks mean booked service lifts, a timed loading bay and security sign-in before you touch anything. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. 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. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, 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. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A day, not a project. New-build carcasses here are 18mm with 20mm tops and no oversail to play with, and the lift car dimension sets your maximum piece length before the design does.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. The same shape decides where splashback pieces break, and a joint in a corner reads as a detail while one in a clear run reads as a mistake. Joint placement is a decision, not an accident. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The laminate has been covering it up. 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. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Sound carcasses are the condition. 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.