Kitchen worktops in Bickley

Yes. Big detached houses with kitchen-diners that were often knocked through from the old scullery and breakfast room, so you get an island of 2.4m or more plus a separate utility and often a boot room. Runs of 4m against a rear wall are normal and second sinks in the utility are common. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. The load plan follows from it.

late-Victorian villa, Edwardian detached, 1930s detached and 1970s executive detached. These houses usually sit in their own grounds with a long approach, so the carry from van to door is longer than anything inside the building. 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.

Wide roads, in-and-out gravel drives and generous frontages mean the van gets close to the door, but the front steps on the older villas are often deep and the kitchen sits at the back down a long hallway. 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. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. That is what the morning is planned around.

Worktop design & quotation, worktop fabrication and worktop installation, in that order. A second kitchen or a kitchenette in an annexe is a small job with the same fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines as a large one. Where the window is fixed there is no second day to fall back on, so the prep list matters more than usual. Sealed before we leave. The stock here justifies thicker material and mitred waterfall ends, and clients expect the island to be a single piece, so we plan the slab layout around the island first and let the perimeter take the joints.

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. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Every join sits over a gable. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. 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.

The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. 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. Protection goes down first. 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.