Kitchen worktops in Eltham

Yes. Overwhelmingly 1930s semis — a kitchen of roughly 2.4m by 3m at the back with a garden door and a separate dining room in front. The standard job is a rear or side-return extension that merges the two into one long room with a 3.5m to 4m run and an island. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. It sits in the fitting line as time on site rather than as anything to do with the stone. Nothing here is added after the fact.

1930s semi, Edwardian terrace, postwar infill and 1960s flats. A long piece has to come through the front door, down the hall, round the newel post and through a doorway with a step down into the addition. The day is planned backwards from the hall, and the scribing takes longer than the carry. Walked, measured, protected, then lifted.

Suburban streets with front drives and dropped kerbs on most roads, so the van usually gets within a few metres of the door; the stretches around the High Street and the station are the exception. Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. Finding it out on the morning costs the whole slot, because there is no second route to fall back on. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Worktop installation, worktop design & quotation and worktop templating, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Material is the slab only, and it says so. The classic Eltham job is templating a new extension where the old back wall has come out — get the steel-supported opening measured properly, it is rarely square to the new build.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. On the day that means dry-laying the whole layout first and only then pulling and bonding the joins. Dry-lay first, always. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. One measurement never describes it, which is why a tape reading taken before the visit rarely matches the template. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. 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. Material is quoted as a supply range and the labour lines separately, because an installed rate per square metre is not a real number. Nothing payable until template. 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.