Worktop design and quotation in Strawberry Hill

Yes. Strawberry Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1, TW2. It is run from the New Malden side, covering South West London & Surrey. 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. It sits in the fitting line as time on site rather than as anything to do with the stone. It is one line among the others, and it is honest. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen is usually a rear room extended into the garden, with the original external wall now standing inside the run. Slab yield rather than floor area is what moves the material line, and the return piece is usually the reason. Priced from the building, not from a rate card. Big interwar houses have solid floors that fall towards the old back door, so worktop level and floor level diverge across a 4m run - shim early.

Quiet leafy roads with in-and-out drives and space to park on the plot, but a couple of railway-side roads narrow to single file and the level crossing holds traffic; mature front trees limit where a lorry can stop. 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. Nothing about it gets estimated after the fact. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop templating and worktop installation. Where an annexe has been built or converted, its floor and its walls are newer than the main house and behave differently under the same run. Everything is itemised: material, template, fabrication, fitting, each cut-out and each metre of upstand. Itemised, so it can be compared honestly. A second kitchen or a kitchenette in an annexe is a small job with the same fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines as a large one. 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.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. 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. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. Send photographs of every corner of the room and it gets priced properly first time. Priced as fabrication, not as area. Send the extension drawing or the unit layout with the actual appliance model numbers, since cut-out sizes come from the appliance, not the cabinet. 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. Nothing is payable until we template, so a quote can sit while consents and decisions catch up. Every line has a reason next to it.