Worktop replacement in Ilford

Yes. Ilford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are IG1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Redbridge. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. 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 stone is heavier going out than it looked coming in. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Wider halls make the carry noticeably easier, and that alone can remove a join that a narrower terrace would have forced into the run. 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. The wall behind the old top has not been seen in years. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The wall has not moved, and neither has the problem.

A car will often hold more than its doors will admit, and it is the clear width between the door edges that a piece actually has to pass through. 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 route is protected once and then used four times. A bay shared across a parade of shops turns over all day, so the arrival time matters more than the length of the booking does. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. The van has to stand through both halves of the day.

It is on the short list of three for this patch, with worktop installation first. Same template, same workshop, same fitters whichever it is. 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 carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Shared-house tops take a decade of hard use. 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. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Specified for wear rather than for the photograph.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The island top is the one that may want its own slab. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Packing the carcasses is part of the replacement. 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. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. A tired carcass is said before, not discovered after.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Level the units first, measure the shape second.

What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The laminate has been covering it up.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is 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. The old top comes off in pieces, not whole.

Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. The units stay, the surface changes.