Kitchen worktops in Kensington

Yes. Two dominant jobs: townhouses off the High Street with the kitchen in the lower ground and a light shaft or vault at the front, and mansion flats where two flats have been laterally joined and the kitchen has been moved from the old rear service position into the middle of the plan with a 2.8-3.4m island. Lateral flats also throw up long uninterrupted runs against a structural wall, sometimes 4m plus, which is where joint placement earns its money. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. It is noted on the job sheet at template so the fitting crew inherit the answer rather than rediscovering it. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

Georgian and early Victorian townhouse, red-brick Queen Anne revival terrace, Edwardian mansion block and lateral conversion flat. Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. We measure the front door, the hall width and the turn into the kitchen before anything comes off the van, because a 3m piece has to swing through that corner on edge and stone does not bend to help you. The slow parts are slow for a reason.

Mansion blocks are the constraint - porters control the goods entrance, works are usually restricted to weekday mid-morning to mid-afternoon, and the service lift is the only one you are allowed to use with materials. Measure the lift car diagonally including the ceiling height, because a 3m slab only goes in a small lift if it can be stood on edge and tilted, and many of these cars have low soffits. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. That is what the morning is planned around.

Worktop design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation, in that order. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. Everything is itemised: material, template, fabrication, fitting, each cut-out and each metre of upstand. Material is the slab only, and it says so. Get the porter's lift dimensions and permitted hours in writing before you order, because a block that only allows deliveries 10am to 4pm turns a one-day install into two.

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. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Nothing is bonded until the whole run sits flat. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. Dry-lay, mark, cut, then bond. 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. 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.