Kitchen worktops in White Hart Lane

Yes. The Tower Gardens conservation estate has small early garden-suburb cottages with kitchens of about 2.4m by 2.4m and original larder recesses - people keep them and work the layout around them. The surrounding terraces are standard back-addition kitchens with a single run. The practical answer is to check the fixture list before the date is offered, because a template slot lost to a road closure cannot be recovered that week. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew.

Victorian terrace, 1920s Tower Gardens cottage estate and post-war block. 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. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Matchdays and events at the stadium close roads, suspend bays and put controlled parking zones in force across the surrounding streets, so a fitting day that lands on a fixture is effectively a lost day. Check the fixture list when booking. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. 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 templating and worktop installation, in that order. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. The room as it is, not as it was drawn. The Tower Gardens estate is a conservation area with original joinery - the larder recess is rarely square, so template it as a bespoke shape rather than cutting a rectangle.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The units stay, the surface changes. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Eased in, never forced. 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. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. No stone is cut from a plan. 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.