Worktop replacement in Bromley-by-Bow

Yes. Bromley-by-Bow is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E3. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. 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. A skip on the frontage takes the space the van needed. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Front doors off the deck open into a lobby barely wider than the door itself, and the turn out of it is a right angle. 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. What is under the old top is the real question. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Nothing about it is a discovery on fitting day.

Managed buildings allow deliveries through the lift only between set hours, and a day that overruns them finishes with the last piece still on the pavement. 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. Cutting a top down indoors means emptying the room first. A short lunchtime window of control exists to keep commuters off the street, and it still catches a trade van standing there for an hour. 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 waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. Upgrading a builder-finish kitchen is mostly a swap, so the cost sits in the material choice rather than in the shape of the room. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Repairable in place beats replaced whole. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A deposit deduction rarely covers a new top.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The new pieces are nested, not traced off the old ones. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The laminate was scribed thin. Stone cannot be. 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. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Owners phase this work; a void period cannot.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Deck access means a long open walkway from the lift or the stair to the front door, and that walk happens with the piece on edge in whatever weather there is. Plaster bonded straight onto concrete comes away with the bottom course of tiles, leaving a band behind the upstand. Sound carcasses are the one condition.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Four flats, four days, no scaffold week.

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. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The sink is chosen before the cut list is set.

Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Where only one car serves the building a breakdown on the morning halts the job outright, so the fallback route is worked out at template rather than on the landing. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. Out and in happen along the same protected route.