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. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

18th-century cottage, Victorian villa, 1930s detached and postwar infill. Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

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. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement, in that order. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. 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.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. The template plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. 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.

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. Units kept, surface changed. 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.