Kitchen worktops in Surrey Quays

Yes. Mostly 1980s and 1990s brick townhouses and low-rise flats built over the filled docks, with narrow galley kitchens at the rear ground floor, roughly 2.5m of run plus a short return, and integrated appliances that were never designed to come out easily. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. Handling is where these pieces get damaged.

1980s dock redevelopment housing, 1990s townhouse and 2010s apartment block. Access is a question about the plot rather than the house: a narrow frontage between older buildings with nowhere obvious to stand a van. Everything comes up in the lift, so we measure the lift car's internal diagonal before the piece is loaded, because a car that takes 2.4m on the diagonal will not take a 3m worktop no matter how you stand it. Walked, measured, protected, then lifted.

Estate roads loop and dead-end around the water, so satnav puts you on the wrong side of a dock; most houses have an allocated bay or an integral garage forecourt within carrying distance of the door. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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 installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Sockets final before template. These kitchens were built to a budget with 600mm carcasses that have sagged, so the units usually need packing and levelling before a stone top goes anywhere near them.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. 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 lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. A tall panel that fits at the worktop will stand off the wall at the top unless the wall is dubbed out or the panel is scribed. An upstand rides what a panel exposes. 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.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Decided before fabrication, not after. 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.