Kitchen worktops in Stonebridge

Yes. Post-regeneration low-rise houses and flats with compact, sensibly planned kitchens, usually an L of about 3m plus 1.8m with the boiler cupboard eating one corner. Units are generally sound and modern enough to keep, so replacement tops and matching upstands are the bulk of the work rather than full rip-outs. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew.

1990s-2000s regeneration low-rise, housing association terrace and surviving Victorian terrace. Walls are dense in-situ concrete or blockwork with a thin skim, which will not be chased back and will not take a plasterboard fixing. The rear kitchen wall in ex-council flats and maisonettes is commonly dense in-situ concrete or blockwork with a thin skim, which means mechanical fixings are hard work and the splashback is held on adhesive rather than screwed. The wall makes that decision, not the brochure.

Estate roads with parking courts and controlled entry, and a lot of the flats are first or second floor with a communal stair rather than a lift, which caps the sensible piece length. Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. Joint positions follow from that.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Appliances on site, not on order. Stair carries in walk-up blocks decide the cut list, so template with the turn on the half-landing in mind and split at a sink or hob cut-out where possible.

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. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The units stay, the surface changes. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The template plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. 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 a landlord or housing provider is involved there is a specification to meet and a process to follow, and both are settled before a date is offered. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. No stone is cut from a plan. 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.