Kitchen worktops in Longford

Yes. A handful of old cottages and inn-adjacent properties with very small kitchens, exposed beams and uneven floors. Single runs of 2m to 2.5m with everything undercounter. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

17th and 18th century cottage, listed coaching-inn stock and 20th century ribbon housing. A two-up two-down has a kitchen that was never designed to be one, so the run is short, the ceiling is low and every millimetre of depth gets argued over. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. Settled on the drawing, cut once.

Frontages sit directly on the Bath Road opposite the airport perimeter fence, with heavy commercial traffic passing and effectively no residential parking. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. It is settled on the bench, not on site.

Worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop fabrication, in that order. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Proven on the bench before dispatch. Low ceilings and beams mean you cannot upend a slab once you are inside, so it comes in flat and gets set in one movement.

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. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Dry-lay first, always. Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. 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. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. The approved drawing is the instruction. 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.