Kitchen worktops in Harrow Road

Yes. Mostly estate flats and maisonettes with small purpose-built kitchens - a 2.1m to 2.6m run, a return under the window, and no dishwasher space unless a unit comes out. Refits are usually driven by a landlord programme, so the spec is standardised across several flats at once. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. A van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. We would rather ask than guess.

post-war council block, 1970s low-rise estate, Victorian terrace and flat above shop. A maisonette puts the kitchen on one of two levels, so an internal staircase may be part of the route as well as the communal one. Plaster bonded straight onto concrete comes away with the bottom course of tiles, leaving a band behind the upstand. What is under the old top is the real question.

Estates along the road use deck walkways, communal fob doors and lifts with a small car, and the road itself has bus lanes and few loading opportunities. Bin stores and bike racks routinely block the shortest route to the block entrance. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. 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. It sets what the day actually looks like.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop templating, in that order. Where a single building holds several small kitchens, the work arrives as one job rather than four, and it should be cut off the same slab run so the batches genuinely match. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. The room as it is, not as it was drawn. Batch refits mean repeated identical layouts, so it is worth templating two or three flats in one visit - just check each one, the concrete openings vary by 10-20mm between units.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The join is the last thing finished. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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.

Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. No stone is cut from a plan. 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.