Worktop replacement in De Beauvoir Town

Yes. De Beauvoir Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. Where the permit is a digital session rather than a paper one, somebody in the house has to start it at the hour the van actually arrives. 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. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. 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. The floor has dropped since the kitchen went in. 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. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Taking the top off is what exposes the floor.

Boxed-in pipework running along the skirting looks harmless until a loaded trolley has to pass it. 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. Two carries in one day needs the route free for both. A resident bay and a shared-use bay can sit on the same street under different rules, and it is usually the shared one a visitor permit or a ticket touches. 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 to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. One plot replaced years on, matched or otherwise. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Shared-house tops take a decade of hard use.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Appliance gaps are checked against the new thickness. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The old cut-out was hiding the notch you now need. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Units checked before stone goes on them.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. Whatever the old top hid comes to light.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Where the staircase comes down into the hall the bottom treads project into the width, and nothing about that can be moved for the day. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. Waste goes out the way the stone came in, so the route stays clear.

What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Levels get corrected before the new top is measured.