Worktop replacement in Harrow Garden Village

Yes. Harrow Garden Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA2, HA5. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Harrow. 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 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. The old tops have to go somewhere as well. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Where the knock-through has taken in a rear bay, the far end of the room is three faces of window with no usable wall left at all. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. Whatever the shell has done since is dealt with now. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The sill was always low. Nobody had to care until now.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for 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. Cutting a top down indoors means emptying the room first. 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 stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Access out counts as much as access in.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop fabrication. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is 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. Between tenancies is the only window there is. 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. One plot replaced years on, matched or otherwise.

An island carries its own edge detail all the way round, so a mitred 100mm apron on four sides is four mitres cut, bonded and polished before the piece ever leaves the bench. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Joins move onto the gables this time round. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

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. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. A straight swap is the exception in an older room. Unlock the side gate and clear the alley of bins, bikes and pots, and arrange a plumber for the sink and an electrician if the hob is hard-wired. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Strip-out and fit inside one access window.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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. Out and in happen along the same protected route.

They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The old larder leaves behind a thick cold shelf and a vent brick through the outer wall, and both have to go before that wall reads flat. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. A thicker top changes what clears the top drawer.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. The wall has not moved, and neither has the problem.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Houses at the later end of this period went up in cavity rather than solid brick, so two that look identical from the road behave differently when a fixing goes in. What catches people out is the junction between the old floor and the extension floor, which is rarely at the same level, so a run carrying across it needs the units packed before stone goes on. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not.