Kitchen worktops in New Cross Gate

Yes. Estate-heavy: maisonettes and flats with fitted galley kitchens around 2.4m, often replaced under housing association or landlord programmes, plus Victorian terraces on the edges that are small two-bed houses with a rear kitchen barely 2m wide. 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. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. Two hours is the realistic figure.

Victorian terrace, 1960s-70s council estate, 1980s housing association terrace and 2010s infill flats. The internal stair is usually a straight flight with a tight top landing, and it is the landing rather than the flight that is the limit. Ex-council flats and maisonettes are built in dense concrete and blockwork, so anything that has to be fixed back, such as brackets under a peninsula or support for an end panel, goes in with proper anchors and an SDS rather than plasterboard fixings. What is under the old top is the real question.

Estate layouts with parking courts, deck access and small lifts, and the retail park and main road restricting where a van can wait; most flats are walk-up or served by a single lift. A car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a three-metre worktop however it is stood, and there is no trimming it on the landing. 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. That is agreed before a plumber is booked.

Worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop templating, in that order. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Units fitted, fixed and level first. Small lifts and deck walkways make jointed pieces normal — design the joint into the run rather than apologising for it later.

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 nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Every join sits over a gable. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The drawing decides it, not the fitter. 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.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.