Worktop replacement in Dartmouth Park

Yes. Dartmouth Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW5. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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. Half a day of parking buys half a job. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The boiler has usually been moved out of the main house into the addition, and its flue, its pipework and its condensate all cross the wall the run wants. 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. Everything the last fit ignored is visible for a morning. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Levels get corrected before the new top is measured.

An inward-opening door swinging back against the wall leaves less clear opening than the frame measures, and a storm porch in front of it is tighter again. 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. Two carries in one day needs the route free for both. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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 carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. 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 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Repairable in place beats replaced whole.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The return is remeasured even where it looks unchanged. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Same footprint, different tolerances. 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 decision usually gets made standing in the room rather than at a desk, which is why a slab is worth viewing whole instead of choosing from a sample card. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Out and in on the same permission.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The sill was always low. Nobody had to care until now.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. The stairs come down against the wall the addition opens off, so the doorway into the kitchen is offset and the corner beside it is taken by the cupboard under the flight. Carcasses are checked for square and fixed back before a stone top goes on them. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. 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. Waste goes out the way the stone came in, so the route stays clear.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Yield is worked out fresh for the new material.