Kitchen worktops in Wealdstone

Yes. Small Victorian and interwar terraces with rear kitchens barely 2.2m wide, and a large body of new apartments built on the old Kodak and industrial land where kitchens are open-plan single walls with an integrated appliance stack. The terraces get replacement tops in the existing footprint; the new flats get upgrades from builder-grade laminate. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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.

Victorian workers' terrace, 1930s terrace and recent flats on former industrial land. A small room puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on one short length, and the bridge of stone left between them decides whether it can be cut in one piece. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Terraced streets with no drives and heavy on-street parking near the High Street, and new blocks with underground parking, height barriers and booked goods lifts. Two completely different loading problems within a few hundred metres. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands, 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. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable exactly where the pieces meet. Sockets final before template. In the small terraces a 600mm deep top will not clear the back door swing, so check whether the door needs rehanging before the stone arrives.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. A layout templated off one wall instead of one datum will not sit right once all the pieces are down together. Real angles, not plan angles. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The laminate has been covering it up. 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 ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. Full-height panels need the wall made good first, which is another trade and another timescale. 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.