Worktop replacement in Highbury

Yes. Highbury is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N5. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Islington. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. 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 waste run is planned, not improvised. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The step down from the main house into the addition is commonly a hundred to a hundred and fifty millimetres, which gives the kitchen a different floor datum from the rest of the ground floor. 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. Sound carcasses are the one condition. 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 sill was always low. Nobody had to care until now.

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. 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. Both movements are planned as one. 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. 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. It is a full day at the kerb, not a delivery.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. The annexe top goes in on the same day. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Booked at short notice, because the notice is short.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Same shape, different cut list. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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. 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. A leaseholder still needs the building to consent.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. 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. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Two loads, one space, one day.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The wall has not moved, and neither has the problem.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Sintered stone at 12mm changes what a staircase can take, because the same run arrives at roughly half the weight of the granite equivalent. 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. The old top leaves by the route the new one arrives on.

The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The old cut-outs prove nothing.