Kitchen worktops in Euston

Yes. Flats above and behind a major transport corridor, with kitchens fixed in position at 2.4-3m of run in a closed room. Replacement work dominates because anything structural is limited by the block's concrete frame. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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 strip-out waits until the new stone has somewhere to stand.

post-war block, 1930s mansion block, Georgian survivor terrace and modern apartment. The kitchen door is a fire door onto a lobby that is also the escape route, so nothing can be stood in that lobby while the work goes on. That suits a full-height piece, because a large flat panel bonded across its back is more stable on concrete than a run of small tiles ever was. A chimney breast breaks the run and the panels follow it.

Bounded by the Euston Road red route with no stopping, and the side streets are Monday to Saturday CPZ with permanent construction traffic on top. Most drops involve a communal entry door, a lobby, then either a small lift or two flights of stairs. Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. Splashback panels are lighter than a worktop and far more awkward, because a tall thin piece has to be carried on edge and cannot be tilted to clear a turn. They stand upright in the van and stay upright until they are on the wall.

Worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands, in that order. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. The fitting day is scheduled to suit that rather than to suit the diary. Booked around the turnaround, not our diary. Post-war blocks here have concrete walls, so you are drilling rather than screwing for splashback and upstand fixings and need the right kit on the first visit.

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. The new pieces are nested, not traced off the old ones. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The stack was boxed in after the kitchen went in. Material starts at £110 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines rather than inside one figure.

Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. A half-day of access is not a fitting day, and it is better to say so at booking than to find out at eleven. Booked with whoever actually holds the keys. Let us know the building when you book, and the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are handled beforehand rather than on the fitting day.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. A passive vent or a ducted extract shaft takes a corner of the kitchen from floor to ceiling and cannot be reduced. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. Two lifts and a turn make it a four-man piece.

The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. A postformed top swallowed the fall. This will not.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. The units below stay exactly as they are; only the surface is replaced. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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. Loading out is loading in, done in reverse and heavier.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. Windows sit in deep concrete reveals with a cast sill, and that reveal is usually the least square thing in the room. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. Suction pads will not hold on a wet or dusty face.