Worktop replacement in Hampstead

Yes. Hampstead is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A bay suspension carries a fee and a notice period, and the notice period is the part that catches people out when a date moves. 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. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. 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. Whatever the shell has done since is dealt with now. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Levels get corrected before the new top is measured.

Weight tells on a staircase more than anywhere else, because there is nowhere to set a piece down mid-flight and no way to change your grip once it is moving. 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. It decides whether the old top leaves whole. Some zones are controlled for a short window in the middle of the day and open either side of it, which makes the timing of the visit the whole question. 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. The waste run is planned, not improvised.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. 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.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The sink is chosen before the cut list is set. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Same footprint, different tolerances. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Replacement suits occupied stock better than a strip-out.

Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. The sill was always low. Nobody had to care until now.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. 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. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Joins move onto the gables this time round.

A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. 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. Both movements are planned as one.