Kitchen worktops in Honor Oak

Yes. Largely interwar and postwar municipal housing on the hill — small square kitchens with a back door and a boiler cupboard and a single run under 3m. Alterations are usually taking out the wall to the dining room rather than extending. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew.

1930s Honor Oak Estate housing, Victorian terrace and postwar maisonette block. Rear access through a garden or a shared path means long pieces can usually come in whole from the back. Concrete and dense block walls in ex-council stock cannot be chased back or packed out to suit, so the template takes the wall exactly as it is and the stone carries the scribe. Recorded as it is, not as it was drawn.

Estate roads on a steep slope with parking courts and stepped front paths, and some blocks reached only from an upper road with a flight of steps down to the entrance. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. That is part of what the visit is for.

Worktop replacement, worktop fabrication and worktop templating, in that order. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Same slab run, or it is not a match. Stepped approaches off the estate roads mean the last ten metres is a stair carry with no barrow option.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Carcasses have to be sound first. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Machined to the real line. 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.

These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. Changing an appliance after the nest is set means recutting the piece, not adjusting it. Changes cost a piece, not a tweak. 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.