Kitchen worktops in Petts Wood

Yes. Very consistent stock from the inter-war estate: the original kitchen is a small rear room, and almost every job is a rear or side-return extension turning it into an L-shaped kitchen-diner with a peninsula. Because the houses repeat, the layouts repeat, typically a 3.6m rear run plus a 2.1m return. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause.

1930s mock-Tudor semi, 1930s detached, 1950s infill and chalet bungalow. The classic arrangement is the original back room with a later extension bolted onto it, so the kitchen is two ages of building in one room. The fitting itself is slower than the carry: original plaster on the party wall and around the old chimney breast is rarely square to the run, so back scribes get cut on site, and where a return wraps into a breast recess we template that shoulder tight and ease it in. The slow parts are slow for a reason.

Front drives on most houses and a side passage on the semis, but the side passages are narrow and often have a gas meter box or bin store in them, so slabs usually go in through the front. A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. The fitting day is planned backwards from that point, before anything comes off the van. None of it is worked out on the doorstep.

Worktop templating, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation, in that order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. That changes what the quote should be compared against, because the shape of the job is not the same as a single family kitchen. Nothing payable until we template. The estate is under an Article 4 style design control on the frontages, so the constraint is scheduling around the builder finishing the extension rather than the fit itself.

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. Joins are pulled with suction clamps and finished flush, then colour-matched, which is the last thing done rather than the first. The join is the last thing finished. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The back edge is eased in progressively rather than offered up once and forced. 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.

Owner-occupied kitchens are usually being done once, which is why the edge profile, the vein direction and where a join falls are worth the conversation. Material is quoted as a supply range and the labour lines separately, because an installed rate per square metre is not a real number. Written to be read by whoever is paying. 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.