Kitchen worktops in Wennington

Yes. A tiny riverside village with a very small housing stock: older cottages and farm properties with thick walls, small windows and kitchens that were never planned as one room. Work here is bespoke by necessity, with runs broken by structural piers and a freestanding cooker rather than a fitted hob in most cases. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb.

village cottage, farmhouse and scattered post-war detached. Doorways are low and narrow, which is a genuine constraint on piece length before anything else is considered. Access through the property is usually the simplest of any archetype, with wide doors and generous rooms, so we can often carry a full-length piece straight in without a planned join. The slow parts are slow for a reason.

No restrictions and easy standing outside most properties, but it is a long haul from anywhere and the approach roads are exposed and narrow in places. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. It gets checked before the first piece is lifted.

Worktop templating, worktop fabrication and worktop installation, 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. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Nested for the job in front of us. Small, one-off rooms out here rarely have a single straight wall, so everything is templated in one visit and cut to that template only.

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. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. One datum for the whole room. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. 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. Sink and hob are dry-fitted on the bench before dispatch, whoever supplied them. The approved drawing is the instruction. 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.