Kitchen worktops in Hainault

Yes. A post-war London County Council out-county estate, so the housing is laid out in repeating blocks of terraces and semis with small original kitchens designed as a working scullery rather than a living space. The usual job is taking out the dividing wall to the dining room, running a 3m L and adding a peninsula where the wall stood; because the layouts repeat street to street, the same kitchen shape comes up again and again. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. A van that has to move mid-fit costs the best part of an hour and takes a man off the tools to do it. The van does not stay on a main road once it is empty.

late-1940s to 1950s LCC cottage estate, ex-council terrace and ex-council semi. The floor is a concrete slab screeded before the units existed, so it falls slightly and consistently towards the back door. The stairwell half-landing is usually the tightest point on the whole route and it dictates the maximum piece. A structure this old is worked with, not corrected.

Genuinely good access by London standards, verges, open frontages, plenty of hardstanding and unrestricted parking on most of the estate roads, plus rear access paths between blocks. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. The strip-out is planned around it.

Worktop replacement and worktop installation, in that order. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Between tenancies is the only window there is. Estate houses often have out-of-plumb walls and old plaster on the original scullery side, so we template rather than measure and expect to trim the scribe on site.

Because a peninsula is seen from both sides, the underside of any overhang gets the same edge treatment as the top, which is easy to leave out of a spec. A layout that has been packed and levelled run by run instead of to one datum shows as a step where two pieces meet. The island is set against the perimeter, not a wall. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The alcove was never square and it still is not. The stone itself starts at £110 per square metre supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines instead of rolled together.

Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Two visits mean two people taking a day off. Tell us about the building at the point of booking, so the lift, the stair turn and any freeholder notice are allowed for in advance.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Floors are a sand and cement screed over concrete, laid fast and worn since, so they are hard, solid and seldom flat. The fitting day is planned backwards from all of it, before the first piece comes off the van. Silicone finishes the job; it does not rescue it.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. 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. We aim for the first slot of the day where parking is tight, because that is when the street is emptiest. Time lost at the kerb never comes back later in the day.

How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. One plot replaced years on, matched or otherwise.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Textured ceiling coatings and old floor tiles in this stock predate 2000, so nothing is scraped, sanded or lifted before anyone knows what it is. Almost everything that makes a fitting day hard is a property of the building rather than of the stone. Overhangs get brackets before anyone leans on them.