Worktop replacement in Hackney Wick

Yes. Hackney Wick is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E9. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Hackney. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. It is a full day at the kerb, not a delivery. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Many of these kitchens are a fitted pod dropped into open floor, so three sides are free and only the fourth is ever scribed. 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. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Same footprint, different tolerances.

Handrails, mirrors and a sloping ceiling panel all eat into the usable diagonal, and none of them appear on a lift specification sheet. 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. Nothing new comes down a hall still full of old top. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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 loads, one space, one day.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A builder-finish kitchen upgrades in a morning. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. The doors are staying, so the colour answers to them.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. A run that flexed under laminate gets support now. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The sill was always low. Nobody had to care until now. 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. A landlord with several similar flats usually wants one specification repeated, so the material, the edge detail and the upstand height are recorded and reused rather than rechosen each time. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Void periods do not extend to suit a lead time.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Appliance gaps are checked against the new thickness.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A lift out of service for the day turns a straightforward install into a stair carry, so the slot gets confirmed with whoever manages the building rather than against a calendar. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. The route is protected once and then used four times.

The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Original brickwork is uneven by ten millimetres or more across a bay, so the back edge is scribed to the actual face rather than to a line. 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. The building has kept moving; the new template catches up.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. A straight swap is the exception in an older room.