Kitchen worktops in Olympia

Yes. The streets around the exhibition halls mix family terraces with lower-ground kitchens and a scatter of former studio houses that have double-height rooms and unusually tall kitchen walls, where clients often want full-height stone rather than an upstand. Terrace kitchens run 3-3.6m with a modest island, and the studio properties throw up one long uninterrupted wall that suits a single-piece splashback. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load plan follows from it.

Victorian terrace, mansion flat, artists' studio house and mixed-use block near the exhibition centre. Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. Settled on the drawing, cut once.

Event days at the exhibition centre bring road closures, traffic management and full parking suspensions on the surrounding streets, so check the event calendar before booking a fit. Otherwise the streets are ordinary CPZ terraces with front paths and steps, and the usual hallway-and-newel problem. A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The drawing carries that decision through to the saw.

Worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Same slab run, or it is not a match. Check whether there is a show on before you book the day, because an exhibition closure can put you 400m from the front door with a full A-frame.

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. Long runs almost never take a single panel, so the joint positions want agreeing before anything is templated. Corners get their own pieces. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. 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 workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. The approved drawing is the instruction. 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.