Kitchen worktops in Acton

Yes. Victorian terraces split into flats with compact galleys, new blocks by the station with developer-spec kitchens, and family houses on the better streets taking the rear extension and island treatment. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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. It is a full day at the kerb, not a delivery.

Victorian terrace, Edwardian terrace, 1930s semi and 2010s-2020s station-side development. Lease conditions and the other flats in the building decide when noisy work can happen, so the fitting day has a start and a finish that are not ours to set. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Settled on the drawing, cut once.

Dense terraced streets with permit parking throughout, plus large new developments with underground loading, security sign-in and booked lifts. The A40 feeds the area from the north. Where the lift will not take the longest run we design a join in rather than gamble, because a piece that will not go up has to go back on the van. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop fabrication, in that order. A licensed shared house has fire-door and escape-route rules that decide how and when stone can be carried through the common parts. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Nested for the job in front of us. Acton is heavy on houses in multiple occupation, so a single job is often four or five small kitchens in one building, and they should be batched off the same slab to match.

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. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Nothing is bonded until the whole run sits flat. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the laser plots the intermediate points. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The laminate has been covering it up. 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.

Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. Changing an appliance after the nest is set means recutting the piece, not adjusting it. Dry-assembled before it leaves. 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.