Kitchen worktops in Welling

Yes. Long stretches of interwar semis behind the main road, kitchens roughly 2.4m by 3m at the rear with a side door to the alley; the typical job is a knock-through into the dining room, with a smaller number of full-width rear extensions carrying an island. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

1930s ribbon-development semi, interwar terrace, postwar infill and flats over shops. A side alley and a back door mean most pieces go in whole, and it is the alley width rather than the front door that decides it. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. What is under the old top is the real question.

The main roads are bus-heavy with waiting restrictions, but the residential streets behind have drives and space; flats above the shopping parades are stair-only. 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. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating, 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. The 1930s side door into the alley usually lands mid-run, either it gets blocked up or the worktop stops short of it.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Dry-lay first, always. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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 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. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. 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.