Kitchen worktops in Shirley

Yes. Larger suburban plots with deep gardens, so rear extensions here go out 4m or more and the finished kitchen usually has an island plus a run of tall units. Chalet bungalows near Shirley Hills have wide, low kitchens where wall cupboards are limited by the eaves. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

1930s semi, 1950s detached, 1960s detached and chalet bungalow. Wide doorways and level thresholds mean full-length pieces go in whole and the join count comes down to slab length alone. The carry is the easy part; the plaster around the old breast and the packing over a moved floor are not. Walked, measured, protected, then lifted.

Easy compared with the north of the borough. Driveways, dropped kerbs and side gates wide enough to wheel a slab round the back to the extension doors. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop templating, 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. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Material is the slab only, and it says so. Where we can get through the side gate straight into a new extension we can fit longer single pieces here than almost anywhere else in Croydon, which is worth designing for.

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. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. Real angles, not plan angles. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. It is the slow part of the day and it should be. 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 someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. Material is quoted as a supply range and the labour lines separately, because an installed rate per square metre is not a real number. Written to be read by whoever is paying. 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.