Worktop replacement in Fulham Reach

Yes. Fulham Reach is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. 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. Access out counts as much as access in. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Piece size is set by the lift car and the entrance dogleg, which routinely turns a two-piece kitchen into a three-piece one. The room itself is the easy part: walls are plumb, corners are square and the floor is flat, so scribes are minimal and joins can be tight. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. A postformed top swallowed the fall. This will not.

Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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. Building management is often the real gate rather than the bay itself, since the barrier, the shutter and the lift each need someone with a fob. 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. Waste needs a space of its own and the street rarely offers one.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. A specification repeated across several plots has to be repeatable, which quietly rules out the natural stones where no two slabs match. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Housings set out for laminate are checked first. Replacing one plot years after handover is the problem nobody plans for, because a quartz colour can be reordered and a granite block cannot. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A builder-finish kitchen upgrades in a morning.

Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The new pieces are nested, not traced off the old ones. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. 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. Book the service lift, loading bay and concierge access for the full day, and confirm the building's permitted working hours in writing. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Programme work takes the flats in sequence.

A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The sink is chosen before the cut list is set.

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. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Sign-in at the gate, a permit on the dash and a named contact are usually wanted before anything comes off the van. 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.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Joins move onto the gables this time round.

Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. The workmanship guarantee is the same either way. It does not extend to a material we did not supply. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. The doors are staying, so the colour answers to them.