Kitchen worktops in High Barnet

Yes. Older, taller houses along and behind the High Street with kitchens in narrow rear wings or semi-basements, low ceilings and no possibility of a wide island, so the typical result is a galley or a tight L with bespoke joinery. Conservation controls mean the work is internal and the window positions stay as they are. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap.

Georgian and Victorian High Street houses, Victorian terrace, 1930s semi and modern infill flats. Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Barnet Hill is a steep, busy A road with no stopping, and the High Street has short loading windows and narrow footways. Many houses have no rear access at all, so everything goes in through a front door directly onto the pavement. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop templating, worktop design & quotation and worktop replacement, in that order. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A plumber either side of us. Semi-basement kitchens mean carrying a slab down a narrow internal stair with a turn, which is harder than going up, and the piece size has to reflect that.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. Each run is priced on its own line against the supply rate, with the join count and the reason for each join stated. Shape first, area second. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. It is fabrication time rather than material, so it appears on the fabrication line and not in the square metre figure. Photographs are worth more than a plan here. 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. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Units kept, surface changed. 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.