Worktop replacement in Alexandra Park

Yes. Alexandra Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N22, N10. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. Where the household has used up the visitor permits it gets for the year, the remaining options are a suspension or a paid bay and both belong on the quote. A replacement is a two-way job, with old tops going out and new stone coming in, so the van needs to stay put across the whole day. Nothing goes out until the route back to the van is clear. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The bay at the front and the back addition at the rear were built to different standards, and the kitchen is nearly always in the weaker of the two. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Nothing goes back on carcasses the building has pulled out of square. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The beading was covering a bowed wall.

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. With no room to turn, the old top gets cut up in the kitchen instead, which is dusty work and needs the room emptied first. Disconnection happens before the old top is lifted, not during. Estate roads inside a controlled zone are sometimes managed privately rather than by the council, which changes who has to be asked. Waste is the part people forget: the old laminate or tired granite has to be walked back to the van and it does not get lighter. The old tops leave in one movement rather than piece by piece.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A day, not a project. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A void week is the entire schedule.

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. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The return is remeasured even where it looks unchanged. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Strip out first, then measure what is actually there. Have a plumber booked to disconnect the sink, tap and waste first thing and reconnect after we have gone, and clear the hallway and stairs completely so we can carry slabs through the house. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Whoever owns the carcasses owns that call.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. The old carcasses are rarely level and never were.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. Nothing new goes down until the run reads level end to end.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. A bay-fronted terrace has a long hall running past the stairs to the kitchen, so the hall turn caps the piece length before the run length does. What the old top has been hiding is usually a floor that settled towards the back and units that were never fixed back to the wall. Units kept, surface changed, one day.

Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above it. Old top out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon, with a plumber either side of us. How old the kitchen is decides how long preparation takes.