Worktop replacement in Keston

Yes. Keston is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. On a drive that only takes one vehicle nose-in, the van has to reverse the whole length of it to get back out, which decides which way it goes in. 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. A timed bay does not cover a strip-out and a fit. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Lime plaster over rubble moves in and out enough that a single long panel will show a gap somewhere along its length. These are the multi-piece jobs: long runs, a large island and often a range cooker that cannot be moved, so the stone is templated in several pieces and how the vein runs across the joins matters. What the last fitter did to the wall shows up on strip-out. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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.

Where the van stands level with the front of the house a piece gets handled twice instead of five times, and stone breaks on handling rather than on the road. 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 way out is measured with the way in. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. 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. Old stone is heavier going out than it looked coming in.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Specified for wear rather than for the photograph. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. No sealing schedule for anybody to forget.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Yield is worked out fresh for the new material. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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 fitter or joiner fix and level the island units beforehand, and get the sink, taps, hob and any range on site before templating so we cut to the actual appliances. Because the money comes out of a household rather than a maintenance budget, phasing is common: tops now, island or splashbacks later, quoted so the second visit still matches the first. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. A tired carcass is said before, not discovered after.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. The units are untouched. Only the top of them changes. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. 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.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. A run that flexed under laminate gets support now.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Walls that are old, thick and rarely straight make dry-laying and scribing the bulk of the day. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Nothing new goes down until the run reads level end to end.

How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. 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. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. The annexe top goes in on the same day.