Worktop design and quotation in St Luke's

Yes. St Luke's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC1V. It is run from the Watford side, covering Hertfordshire & North London. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. It sits in the fitting line as time on site rather than as anything to do with the stone. It is one line among the others, and it is honest. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Balcony access and long communal corridors are often the carry route, and both are narrower than they look with a piece on edge. If the diagonal of the car will not take a full-length piece, the worktop gets designed around the lift rather than around the room, which means extra joins, worse nesting on the slab and sometimes a second slab bought to produce the same kitchen in more pieces. You see it before you commit to anything. Stone stairs and iron rails mean corner protection on every turn, since a chipped edge on the way up is the most common loss on these blocks.

Old Street and City Road are red routes, and the estates have courtyards with bollards and narrow arched entries built for handcarts rather than vans. The older blocks are walk-ups with stone stairs and iron balustrades that do not forgive a swung slab. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. That is why the fitting line on a quote reflects manpower and time rather than square metres. Nothing about it gets estimated after the fact. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Everything is itemised: material, template, fabrication, fitting, each cut-out and each metre of upstand. Material is the slab only, and it says so. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Nothing payable until we template.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. Slab yield is worked out at quote stage, so if the layout forces a second slab you hear it before you commit rather than after. Shape first, area second. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. It is fabrication time rather than material, so it appears on the fabrication line and not in the square metre figure. Priced as fabrication, not as area. Measure the internal lift car — width, depth and height — and photograph the stair turn and landing doors, then send those with the run lengths. 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. Nothing is payable until we template, so a quote can sit while consents and decisions catch up. Nothing payable until template.