Kitchen worktops in Middle Park

Yes. Uniform interwar municipal terraces and semis: a narrow rear kitchen with a chimney breast, back door and larder, giving about 2.4m of usable run unless the wall to the dining room comes out. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The crate spec follows the length of the carry.

1930s LCC cottage estate, postwar terrace and 1960s low-rise flats. Some of these plans put a bathroom on the ground floor off the kitchen, so a third door opens into a room that already has more doors than wall. The kitchen is usually a small square or L-shaped room reached through a narrow entrance lobby and a standard internal doorway, so the limit on piece length is the turn out of the lobby, and short runs mean joins are often avoidable altogether if the layout is nested tightly. Nothing is machined square because a plan says square.

Straightforward estate access with wide roads, verges, mostly free on-street parking and short front paths, though some flat blocks have only a communal stair. Spindles and a newel cap stand proud of the string, so the usable width on a turn is measured to the handrail rather than to the wall behind it. 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. Both movements are planned as one.

Worktop replacement and worktop fabrication, in that order. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Booked at short notice, because the notice is short. Repeated house types mean the same layout comes round again and again, once you've templated one, the next is close but never identical.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Short pieces cost bench time, not slab area. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The old cut-out was hiding the notch you now need. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

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. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Owners phase this work; a void period cannot. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Internal partitions are dense block finished in a hard sand and cement plaster, which is unforgiving to drill and unforgiving to make good. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Proven on the bench, then loaded.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. The old top leaves by the route the new one arrives on.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. We pack for the tail lift we are actually going to use.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. The rear door has a concrete step and a small canopy over it, and that step is the whole of the difference between the kitchen floor and the garden path. The notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius, because a square internal corner there is where a top fails. The shell decides the piece; the slab decides only the yield.