Kitchen worktops in Putney Vale

Yes. A compact interwar estate where houses have small rear kitchens with a larder recess, and the usual improvement is opening into the rear lobby to gain a return of about 1.5m. Layouts stay modest with no islands and limited wall space above the run. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. The waste run is planned, not improvised.

1930s cottage estate house, Postwar terrace and Low-rise flat. There is usually a shared rear alley, and whether the gate onto it is unlocked decides whether long pieces come in from the back. Access is usually the easy part here, as most of these have a side gate and a back door straight into the kitchen, so we carry down the side alley rather than through the house and keep the mess outside. That is the shape of the day.

The estate sits beside the A3 and is reached from a small number of entrances, so the approach has to be right first time or it means a long detour. Inside the estate the roads are quiet with unrestricted parking close to the doors. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. That is what the morning is planned around.

Worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. Wall space is short here, so if a client wants a full-height stone splashback behind the hob, check the extractor bracket position first, it usually lands right where the panel edge would be.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Dry-lay first, always. 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. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. 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.

Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. 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.