Kitchen worktops in Fulham Reach

Yes. Developer kitchens throughout, so you are usually working to a fixed footprint - a run of 3-3.6m against a service wall plus an island of around 2.2m, all sitting over pre-routed services that cannot move. Upgrades from the original composite tops to full-slab quartz or Dekton are the bread and butter, and the sink cut-out has to match the existing undermount position exactly. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

2010s riverside apartment block, wharf and distillery site redevelopment, concierge tower and riverside townhouse. Dot-and-dab plasterboard bellies at a taped internal angle, so the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm and a plan-angle mitre will not close. The room is square and the plasterboard is not, so the internal corner is recorded as it is rather than as ninety degrees. No stone is ever cut from a plan.

Managed estate with a concierge desk, contractor sign-in, insurance checks and a booked goods lift that has to be protected before use. There is a basement car park with a height barrier and a loading bay, and once out of the lift the corridors are long and carpeted, so boards go down before anything is wheeled. Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. The laser records it along with everything else.

Worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation, in that order. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. The room as it is, not as it was drawn. Everything is fixed by the developer's services, so this is a precision replacement job - measure the existing undermount and drainage grooves, do not redesign them.

If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The units stay, the surface changes. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Eased in, never forced. 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. The template happens when the units are in, fixed and level, whoever is fitting them. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come. 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.