Kitchen worktops in Kew

Yes. Neat Victorian and Edwardian terraces where the standard project is a modest side-return infill giving a 3.2m run plus a 1.5m return, with a rooflight over the sink; kitchens stay lighter and smaller in scale here than in the big Sheen semis, and islands are the exception. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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.

Georgian house on the Green, Victorian terrace, Edwardian terrace and 1930s semi. The back addition is a narrow two-storey outrigger with a single external wall, and the kitchen galley runs the length of it. The second thing is the carry route: front door, narrow hall, a turn at the stairs and often a step down into the extension, which can mean a piece that would template in one length has to be split to physically get into the room. Priced from the building, not from a rate card.

Conservation area covering most of the streets, so skips and scaffolding are consented and frontages are protected; parking is permit-controlled all day and the level crossing and one-way loops make the approach slow. Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. That is why the fitting line on a quote reflects manpower and time rather than square metres. You see that figure before we template, not after.

Worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation, in that order. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Conservation rules keep the extensions narrow, so the run ends up long and thin - watch the overhang at the return where the wall kicks out.

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. Slab yield is worked out at quote stage, so if the layout forces a second slab you hear it before you commit rather than after. 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. This is the item most often left out of a cheaper quote, and it comes back as a variation once the templater has been. 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.

The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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.