Penge worktops
The kitchens we meet in Penge
The worktop jobs we quote in Penge are priced off what is actually behind the units rather than off a floor plan. Dense Victorian terraces with narrow rear kitchens, usually a 2.6-3.2m single run in the back addition, and a lot of two-flat conversions where the ground floor kitchen opens to the garden and the upper flat's kitchen sits over it. Small footprints mean every millimetre of run counts. If your kitchen is a bit of both, that is common enough and it changes nothing about how we go about it.
A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. Hardness and toughness are separate properties, and the surface that laughs off a knife is often the one least willing to survive an unsupported corner. Speckle hides a working kitchen; a flat dark gloss advertises one.
The combination boiler hangs on whichever wall happened to be external, and that decision has already used up a stretch of the only wall the run wanted. The kitchen in one of these sits in the back addition and takes its daylight from one end, so the working half of the run is the darker half and a pale stone with a honed or matt face does more there than any colour with depth in it. Plain stone takes the seam that a long carry forces.
The building stock is Victorian terrace, Victorian villa conversion, 1960s block of flats and new-build apartments. That is why the same worktop costs differently two doors apart.
