Kitchen worktops in Liverpool Street

Yes. Residential units are mostly upper-floor conversions in narrow-fronted commercial buildings, so kitchens are long and thin - a 3m single run along one wall with no facing return, and appliances stacked rather than spread. Ceiling heights are generous but the plan is tight, which is why full-height stone behind the run is more common here than wall cupboards. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. A van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. The day is built around that window.

Victorian commercial building converted to flats, modern apartment above retail, narrow court and alley building and mixed-use scheme near the station. The lift is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a turn at every half-landing. Mansion-block kitchens usually have a serviced riser or boxed pipework somewhere in the run, and the boxing is rarely the same depth from one end to the other, so the template takes the depth at worktop height at several points rather than one reading. Two to three hours, once the units are in.

Station-side streets carry very heavy pedestrian flow all day and several approach lanes are pedestrianised or too narrow for a Luton, so the van stops further out than you would like. Entrances are frequently a single door in a narrow court with a straight steep stair and no lift, which caps piece length hard at what two people can pivot on a landing. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation, in that order. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Long thin kitchens in narrow buildings mean the run is easy and the stair is not - build the joints around the landing pivot, not the wall length.

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. 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. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Eased in, never forced. 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. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. 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.