Worktop replacement in Covent Garden

Yes. Covent Garden is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are WC2. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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. The strip-out waits until the new stone has somewhere to stand. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The closet wing is a narrow projection at the back with windows on two sides, which leaves very little continuous wall for a run. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Chipboard that has taken water will not take stone. 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. 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.

Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. Worth remembering that the old tops have to come out the way the new ones come in, and a laminate run is easier to remove in one length than to carry in one. The strip-out is planned around it. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. Loading out is loading in, done in reverse and heavier.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. The doors are staying, so the colour answers to them. Several units in one building are fitted out to the same drawing, so an error on that drawing is an error repeated in every flat. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Between tenancies is the only window there is.

A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Joins move onto the gables this time round. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. A tired carcass is said before, not discovered after.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. 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. The floor has dropped since the kitchen went in.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. The lift, if there is one, is measured on the diagonal, because that is the dimension a long piece actually uses. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. 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. It sets what the day actually looks like.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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.