Worktop replacement in Dagenham Village

Yes. Dagenham Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM10. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Barking and Dagenham. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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 carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

These were built with generous room sizes for their date, so a peninsula fits where a speculative house of the same age would not take one. 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 building has kept moving; the new template catches up. A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. What is behind the old top decides the day.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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. Whether the strip-out is a cut-up job is settled at template. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. 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. Booking the bay for the whole day is the honest plan.

It is inside the three we do most here, under worktop installation. Either way: same template, same workshop, same fitters. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Repairable in place beats replaced whole.

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. 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. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The beading was covering a bowed wall. 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 owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. 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 template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Textured ceiling coatings and old floor tiles in this stock predate 2000, so nothing is scraped, sanded or lifted before anyone knows what it is. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. A thicker top changes what clears the top drawer.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. A passive vent or a ducted extract shaft takes a corner of the kitchen from floor to ceiling and cannot be reduced. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. The units are relevelled before anything new is bedded.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. 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. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Yield is worked out fresh for the new material.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. The shape is already there to be measured, which makes the template straightforward and leaves the strip-out as the part that actually needs planning. A run that flexed under laminate gets support now.