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. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. What the old top has been hiding is usually a floor that settled towards the back and units that were never fixed back to the wall. Units kept, surface changed, one day. Listed-building consent shapes what you can fix to a wall, so upstands often replace tiled splashbacks and the area steps dictate slab sizes long before the kitchen layout does.

Steep hills, single-track lanes, cobbled and stepped sections that no van gets near, and a CPZ with almost no loading space anywhere near the Village. Lower-ground kitchens are reached down an external area staircase with a tight quarter turn at the bottom, which is normally the narrowest point on the whole job. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. 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 sets what the day actually looks like.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop design & quotation and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A day, not a project. 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 carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A day, not a project.

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. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The units stay, the surface changes. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Found at template, not on fit day. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A plumber disconnects before we arrive and reconnects after we leave, and that is worth booking early. Units kept, surface changed.