Kitchen worktops in Croydon Town Centre

Yes. Almost entirely flats. Kitchens are compact open-plan corners of a living space, typically a 2.4-3m run with an integrated hob, a slim peninsula and no room for a separate utility. Office conversions often have very deep floorplates with the kitchen against an internal wall and no window at all. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. Panels come off the van in one trip where possible, since a tall piece handled repeatedly is a piece asking to be chipped. That is why they are crated the way they are.

high-rise apartment tower, office-to-residential conversion, 1960s block and new-build development. Concrete panel walls bow noticeably over the length of a run, so the template picks up the real line and the back edge is cut to follow it. Ex-council flats and maisonettes are built in dense concrete and blockwork, so anything that has to be fixed back, such as brackets under a peninsula or support for an end panel, goes in with proper anchors and an SDS rather than plasterboard fixings. What is under the old top is the real question.

Concierge desks, booked service lifts, loading bays with 30-minute limits and no parking anywhere near the entrance. Everything is scheduled around the building's delivery hours. 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. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop splashbacks & upstands, 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. Splashbacks and upstands are cut from the same slab run at the same time, which is the only way the batch actually matches. Siliconed to the worktop, never grouted. In tower blocks the lift car dimension sets the maximum piece, and if the goods lift is out we are not carrying stone up twenty floors, so the fit gets rebooked rather than improvised.

Peninsulas frequently land on a lightweight partition or on units that were never fixed down, and stone needs proper support under it before it goes on. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. The drawing leaves site complete. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Found at template, not on fit day. 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.

A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. A 100mm upstand is the low-maintenance answer, and full-height stone is the one that has to be committed to early. Decided before fabrication, not after. 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.