Worktop replacement in Crofton Park

Yes. Crofton Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE4. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. 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. Half a day of parking buys half a job. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The chimney breast has almost always been taken out of the kitchen with the stack left standing above it, so that bay of wall is newer plasterwork on a different plane. 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. Same units, straighter line, better surface. 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. What passed for a fit in chipboard will not pass in stone.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. 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 way out is measured with the way in. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. The carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Same day, because the void is the whole budget. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Repairable in place beats replaced whole.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. A thinner top drops the run against the tiles. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

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. Taking the top off is what exposes the floor. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. 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.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Stone is far heavier than what is coming off.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. 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 cut-out was hiding the notch you now need.

An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. 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. Two loads share the one space here, the old tops waiting to go and the new stone waiting to come in. Booking the bay for the whole day is the honest plan.

An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Ceilings are high in these, so wall unit heights and splashback heights are open choices rather than things the room has already decided. 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. The wall behind the old top has not been seen in years.