Kitchen worktops in Kensal Green

Yes. Terraced houses with narrow back additions and a growing number of canal-side and former-industrial new-build flats with open-plan kitchen-living rooms. The house jobs are typically 3m plus a 1.5m return with the boiler still in the kitchen, and the flats are handover kitchens being upgraded from laminate without moving a single unit. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew.

Victorian terrace, Edwardian terrace and canal-side new-build block. A long piece has to come through the front door, down the hall, round the newel post and through a doorway with a step down into the addition. Where a client wants a full-height piece behind the hob, it usually sits in the old chimney recess, and that recess is rarely square top to bottom or side to side, so it has to be templated as a trapezium rather than a rectangle. Cut from the same slab run as the tops.

Harrow Road and the gasworks-side roads are busy through the day with restricted stopping, and the residential side streets are permit-only. New blocks have proper loading bays but require a booking slot and a goods lift key. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. Joint positions follow from that.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. 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. In the new flats the units are often carcass-and-door systems with thin tops and no rails, so check the cabinet tops can carry 20mm stone before pricing.

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. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Corners get their own pieces. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. The template plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Plotted, not estimated. 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. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. 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.