Kitchen worktops in Kentish Town

Yes. The standard is a two or three storey Victorian terrace with the kitchen in the back addition, giving a long thin room and an L-run down one wall with the boiler cupboard eating the corner. Side-return infills are common on the streets off Fortess Road and turn that into a 4-5m galley, with an island only where the return is wide enough to leave a walkway. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. It is a full day at the kerb, not a delivery.

Victorian terrace, 1930s mansion block, post-war ex-local-authority and Edwardian terrace. The back addition is a narrow two-storey outrigger with a single external wall, and the kitchen galley runs the length of it. What the old top has been hiding is usually a floor that settled towards the back and units that were never fixed back to the wall. Sound carcasses are the one condition.

Camden CPZ Monday to Saturday with very fast bay turnover, and the side roads off Kentish Town Road are one-way with build-outs, so the van usually stops on the main road and the slab is walked in. Front doors sit up three to five steps behind railings and the halls are typically under 900mm, which is the real limiting dimension rather than the doorway. A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. 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 templating and worktop installation, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. One visit, with the sink and hob seated and sealed before we leave. Sealed before we leave. Rear-addition walls here are routinely out by 15-25mm over 3m, so template on site and scribe rather than trusting a plan, and allow for a join where old brick meets new blockwork on a fresh extension.

A galley run down a side-return extension usually measures longer than a slab will give in one length, so a join is designed in from the start rather than discovered. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. Real angles, not plan angles. 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. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. 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.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. Access for the whole slot, or a different day. 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.