Kitchen worktops in West Putney

Yes. Big detached and semi-detached houses on the hill with kitchens at lower-ground or rear-garden level, usually holding a 3m island plus a full-height larder wall and a separate utility. Many have been converted into two or three flats, each with a kitchen squeezed into a former bedroom. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. It is noted on the job sheet at template so the fitting crew inherit the answer rather than rediscovering it. Two hours is the realistic figure.

Large Victorian villa, Edwardian detached, 1930s semi and Conversion flat. Handmade brick and lime plaster move visibly along a run, and a straight-cut back edge shows it immediately. An island a few hundred millimetres over the usable slab length costs a whole second slab, which is worth knowing before the layout is fixed. Priced from the building, not from a rate card.

The gradient is the defining factor — driveways slope steeply, and moving a loaded trolley on a wet incline is a real hazard, so kit comes off the van at the top and goes down by hand. Parking is permit-controlled and the roads are narrow with parked cars both sides. 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. 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 design & quotation, worktop templating and worktop installation, in that order. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. Comparing quotes only works when they itemise the same things, and this is where the differences usually hide. Material is the slab only, and it says so. Sloping sites mean the ground-floor and garden-level rooms rarely share a datum, so set out from the finished floor in each room rather than assuming one worktop height throughout.

On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. On the day it means dry-laying, marking, and cutting the scribe on site before anything is bonded. It is the slow part of the day and it should be. 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 householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The quote is written so it can be read by whoever is paying rather than only by whoever is standing in the kitchen. 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.