Worktop replacement in Greenwich Peninsula

Yes. Greenwich Peninsula is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE10. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. 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. Waste needs a space of its own and the street rarely offers one. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Windows are large industrial openings with deep sills, and a run finishing at one meets a reveal a full brick deep. Converted warehouses put the kitchen against original brick or blockwork that has never been made flat, so scribes of 15 to 20mm along a run are normal and every piece is templated to the wall exactly as it is rather than to a drawing. Whatever the shell has done since is dealt with now. An intruding steel column, a brick pier or a downstand breaks a run that would otherwise have been one clean piece. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The old carcasses are rarely level and never were.

Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. 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. Half a day can go on the strip-out where the way in is tight. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. 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. A timed bay does not cover a strip-out and a fit.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop splashbacks & upstands. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. The doors are staying, so the colour answers to them. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Between tenancies is the only window there is.

A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. A filler strip is evidence, not decoration. Book the goods lift and loading bay for the day, clear a straight route through the open plan, and have a plumber on hand for the island services coming up through the floor. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Void periods do not extend to suit a lead time.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. 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.

Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. One plot replaced years on, matched or otherwise.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The units are untouched. Only the top of them changes. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Old stone is heavier going out than it looked coming in.

Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. Services run on the surface in these buildings, so conduit and pipework cross the wall behind the units and stand proud of it. Many of these kitchens are island pods in the middle of an open plan with waste and feeds coming up through the floor, so the island cannot be nudged to suit the stone and the stone gets cut to suit the island. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not.