Kitchen worktops in Silvertown

Yes. The 1990s village housing has small enclosed kitchens of about 2.4m that owners open into the dining room for a peninsula, while the newer dockside apartments have open-plan kitchens with an island of 1.6m to 2m facing the water. Warehouse-style conversions have exposed structure and a kitchen set out as a free-standing run. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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.

1990s Britannia Village housing, converted industrial building and recent dockside apartment block. A riverside block is a managed building with a booked goods lift, a loading bay and a concierge, and all three have to line up on the same day. If the diagonal is short we either split the run with a planned join or, on lower floors, carry up the stairwell, which needs the half-landing turn checking as well. Walked, measured, protected, then lifted.

Roads here are wide, industrial in character and largely unrestricted, so a large van can get right up to most buildings, which is unusual for the Docklands. The catch is that new blocks are gated with limited visitor access and single-lift cores, and some plots are only reachable via a long one-way loop round the dock. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. We walk the route with a tape and protect it end to end before the first piece is lifted. It gets checked before the first piece is lifted.

Worktop installation, worktop templating and worktop replacement, 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. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. Appliances on site, not on order. Vehicle access is easy but the buildings are not, so the constraint shifts from the street to the lift and the flat's entrance door.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. Dry-lay first, always. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. The laser plots it as it is, at the exact height the worktop will sit, and the drawing carries that through. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. 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. The templater needs the sink, tap and hob on site, and a Belfast sink installed at its final height. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come. 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.