Kitchen worktops in World's End

Yes. The estate flats have compact, tightly planned kitchens of roughly 2.0-2.8m with a serving opening to the living room, and the units are shallow with a fixed boiler cupboard in the run. Because the blocks were built as a system, the kitchens repeat almost identically flat to flat, so once you have templated one layout you know what the next one looks like. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap.

1970s brown-brick estate towers with deck access, Victorian terrace on the King's Road tail, postwar low-rise flats and shop with maisonette over. A maisonette puts the kitchen on one of two levels, so an internal staircase may be part of the route as well as the communal one. Deck access or a single narrow staircase with tight half-landings means long pieces get walked up on edge, and the landing turn is checked before we commit. That is the shape of the day.

Vehicles cannot get to most front doors - you park at a designated bay and cross a raised podium and covered walkways on foot, then take a lift that serves several levels of deck. The lifts are narrow with a shallow car depth, so slabs go in on edge and anything over about 2.4m needs the stair, and the stairs are dog-leg concrete with steel handrails at shoulder height. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. That is what the morning is planned around.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. The prep list is not optional. Repeatable layouts but a brutal carry - the podium walk plus a shallow lift car is why pieces here get jointed at the hob even when they would technically fit the kitchen.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Carcasses have to be sound first. Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. Rushing that is what leaves a gap you look at every morning for fifteen years. 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.

Managed stock usually comes with its own rules about working hours, waste, and who is allowed on site. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. Access for the whole slot, or a different day. 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.