Kitchen worktops in West Wickham

Yes. Classic inter-war suburban stock where the standard project is knocking the kitchen into the dining room and extending 3m to the rear, producing a 4m run plus an island around 1.8-2.2m. Bin drawers, boiling taps and a separate utility door to the garden come up on nearly every specification. 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. The fitting slot is set around it, which is why we ask about it when the date is booked and not before we leave the yard. It is why the arrival time is what it is.

1930s semi, 1930s detached, 1950s detached and 1960s flats. The kitchen is usually a rear room extended into the garden, with the original external wall now standing inside the run. These are typically two runs and a return, often into a rear extension, and the return piece is the awkward one, short, wide and rarely nesting well against the long pieces on the slab, so slab yield rather than total area is what pushes the material line up. That is what the itemised lines are for.

Good driveways and dropped kerbs on most roads, though the semis have a shared drive on some streets where you have to co-ordinate with the neighbour before blocking it. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. That is why the fitting line on a quote reflects manpower and time rather than square metres. Nothing about it gets estimated after the fact.

Worktop design & quotation, worktop installation and worktop templating, 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. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Itemised, so it can be compared honestly. The repeated 1930s footprint means the island rarely sits square to the original walls once the extension goes on, so the island is set off the new steels, not the old wall line.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. One datum for the whole room. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. The template plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Plotted, not estimated. 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 quote is written so it can be read by whoever is paying rather than only by whoever is standing in the kitchen. Written to be read by whoever is paying. 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.