Worktop design and quotation in Maida Vale

Yes. Maida Vale is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W9. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. It sits in the fitting line as time on site rather than as anything to do with the stone. It is one line among the others, and it is honest. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Permitted works hours are commonly weekdays with a late start and an early finish, so a one-day fit is planned around the porter and the lift. If the diagonal of the car will not take a full-length piece, the worktop gets designed around the lift rather than around the room, which means extra joins, worse nesting on the slab and sometimes a second slab bought to produce the same kitchen in more pieces. That is what the itemised lines are for. Original mansion-block lifts take a person and a toolbox, not a slab - assume everything goes up the stairs and price the labour accordingly.

The blocks are portered and run formal house rules - weekday works hours only, no noisy work before 9am or after 5pm, mandatory lift and floor protection, and often a rear service entrance you must use instead of the main hall. The original passenger lifts are small cars with folding gates. Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. An access-driven join is priced like any other join, and people are always surprised to see one on a dead straight run. It appears as its own line rather than buried in a rate.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Itemised, so it can be compared honestly. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Comparing quotes only works when they itemise the same things, and this is where the differences usually hide. Nothing payable until we template.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. It is the shape rather than the square metreage that moves the number, which is why two kitchens the same size quote differently. No installed rate per square metre, because it is not a real number. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. It is fabrication time rather than material, so it appears on the fabrication line and not in the square metre figure. Priced as fabrication, not as area. Measure the internal lift car, width, depth and height, and photograph the stair turn and landing doors, then send those with the run lengths. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. Material is quoted as a supply range and the labour lines separately, because an installed rate per square metre is not a real number. Written to be read by whoever is paying.