Kitchen worktops in Old Bexley

Yes. The village core has small period cottages with low ceilings, uneven floors and kitchens in single-storey rear outshots — short scribed runs, no islands — while the larger Victorian and interwar houses on the edges have proper kitchen-diners. 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. Two hours is the realistic figure.

18th-century cottage, Victorian villa, 1930s detached and postwar infill. 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. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. What is under the old top is the real question.

A narrow conservation-area high street with a level crossing, restricted parking and no rear access to the older cottages, so deliveries have to be timed around the barrier and the school run. The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. 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. That is agreed before a plumber is booked.

Worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement, 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. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A day, not a project. In the old cottages, door and beam heights matter as much as widths — a slab on edge won't always clear the lintel.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The bench proves it before the van does. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. It is recorded on the drawing with the run dimensions so the workshop is not guessing. Plotted, not estimated. 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 plumber disconnects before we arrive and reconnects after we leave, and that is worth booking early. Plumber either side of us. 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.