Worktop replacement in Eel Pie Island

Yes. Eel Pie Island is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW1. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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. Loading out is loading in, done in reverse and heavier. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. 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. What is under the old top is the real question. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. A postformed top swallowed the fall. This will not.

Turning a heavy piece on edge indoors needs floor space at both ends of the turn, so the hall is cleared of furniture before anything comes off the van. 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. Waste goes out the way the stone came in, so the route stays clear. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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. Two carries in one day doubles what the distance costs.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and 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. 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. A deposit deduction rarely covers a new top. 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. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Four flats, four days, no scaffold week.

Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Breakfast bars get the steel they never had. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

An unsupported overhang off a stud wall wants noggins fixed between the studs before the boarding goes on, and once it is boarded and skimmed that option has gone. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The alcove was never square and it still is not. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Nothing to reseal is the point in a let.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The new pieces are nested, not traced off the old ones.

Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. 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. A surface swap is the fastest upgrade available on a kitchen that is otherwise sound. Cam-lock carcasses get braced before stone lands.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Stud centres are almost never where the brackets would like to be, so fixing positions get set from the framing and the stone is designed to suit. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. What passed for a fit in chipboard will not pass in stone.

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. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Two people will walk a two-metre piece in through a front door; the same hall with a three-metre piece wants four, purely because nobody can let go halfway. 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. Disconnection happens before the old top is lifted, not during.