Worktop replacement in Foots Cray

Yes. Foots Cray is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. 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. The waste run is planned, not improvised. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Floors are suspended timber over a shallow void and have moved, so the units are packed and levelled before anything is set on them. 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. A new top on a settled run needs the run corrected first. 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. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The sill was always low. Nobody had to care until now.

Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. 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 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. 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. It is a full day at the kerb, not a delivery.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop fabrication. 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. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Shared-house tops take a decade of hard use. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Specified for wear rather than for the photograph.

A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Yield is worked out fresh for the new material. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. A straight swap is the exception in an older room. 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 the provider has set the specification the material choice was made once for a great many kitchens, and the useful work is meeting it exactly rather than proposing something else on the day. 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 boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. A run that flexed under laminate gets support now.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. A small room puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on one short length, and the bridge of stone left between them decides whether it can be cut in one piece. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. The fabric gets checked while it is open.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Appliance gaps are checked against the new thickness.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. The wall has not moved, and neither has the problem.