Worktop replacement in Dulwich Village

Yes. Dulwich Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE21. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. 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. Booking the bay for the whole day is the honest plan. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. Post-war terraces have small, roughly square kitchens with a back door and a window in the middle of the run, so runs are short and joins are rare, but there are usually two corners and a window cill to work around in a couple of metres. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. 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. It decides whether the old top leaves whole. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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 units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Repairable in place beats replaced whole. 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 carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A deposit deduction rarely covers a new top.

A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. A thinner top drops the run against the tiles. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Strip out first, then measure what is actually there. Empty the base units completely and have a plumber disconnect the sink, tap and any washing machine plumbed in under the worktop before we arrive. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Disposal is named, not assumed.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The old carcasses are rarely level and never were.

Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. 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. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Four flats, four days, no scaffold week.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. 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. 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. Both movements are planned as one.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. A stub wall divides the kitchen from the back lobby, and it rarely stayed where the original drawing put it. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. Stone is far heavier than what is coming off.