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. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

Victorian terrace, 1960s-70s council estate, 1980s housing association terrace and 2010s infill flats. These are built in dense concrete, so support for a peninsula or an end panel goes in with proper anchors rather than plugs. The plaster is bonded straight onto the concrete, so the bottom course of tiles tends to bring plaster with it when the old top comes off, leaving a rough band behind the upstand. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

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. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop templating, 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. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Appliances on site, not on order. Small lifts and deck walkways make jointed pieces normal, design the joint into the run rather than apologising for it later.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. 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. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Radiused, polished, and clear of the joins. 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.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. No stone is cut from a plan. 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.