Worktop replacement in Avery Hill

Yes. Avery Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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. Where the van must move, the waste goes on first. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Flats are handed in pairs about the stair core, so half the kitchens in the block are the mirror image of the other half. Ex-council flats and maisonettes are built in dense concrete and blockwork, so anything that has to be fixed back, such as brackets under a peninsula or support for an end panel, goes in with proper anchors and an SDS rather than plasterboard fixings. The floor has dropped since the kitchen went in. A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. It was there long before we were.

Even an easy kerbside carry wants the pavement clear at the tail lift, because a three-metre piece on edge has a swing radius nobody expects until it is swinging. 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. Half a day can go on the strip-out where the way in is tight. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. A skip on the frontage takes the space the van needed.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop splashbacks & upstands. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. No sealing schedule for anybody to forget. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. The annexe top goes in on the same day.

Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The strip-out is the part worth planning. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The old top hid it. The drawing will not. Sort a parking bay or permit near the entrance, confirm the lift is in service and get us the door codes, and tell us about any asbestos survey on the flat before we start stripping out. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. One day out of use, agreed in advance.

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. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The ceiling is a concrete soffit with a skim on it, so there is nothing to fix into overhead and no void to hide anything in. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Chipboard carcasses get bracing before stone lands on them.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. The waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. A drying balcony opened off the kitchen originally and many have since been glazed in, which turns an external wall into an internal one with the old threshold still in it. Plaster bonded straight onto concrete comes away with the bottom course of tiles, leaving a band behind the upstand. Whatever the shell has done since is dealt with now.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. A thinner top drops the run against the tiles.