Kitchen worktops in Well Hall

Yes. The Progress Estate houses have small, oddly shaped kitchens with sloping ceilings, deep window reveals and non-standard room widths, so units get cut in and the worktop ends up as several short scribed pieces rather than one long run. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load plan follows from it.

1915 Progress Estate Arts and Crafts housing, 1930s semi and interwar terrace. Original quarry-tiled floors sit lower than a later screed, so a run crossing that junction needs the units packed to one level. What does drive the bench work is the knocked-through kitchen-diner: the return worktop and any peninsula are seen end-on from the dining side, so we nest the pieces so the veining carries across the internal corner in the same direction rather than turning through ninety degrees. Settled on the drawing, cut once.

A conservation area of narrow lanes, grass verges you should not drive across and very few dropped kerbs; parking is on-street and often a fair distance from the house. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. It is settled on the bench, not on site.

Worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop replacement, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. The room as it is, not as it was drawn. Nothing on this estate is a standard depth or a standard angle, template everything and assume no repeat pieces between houses.

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. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The units stay, the surface changes. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. 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 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. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come. 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.