Worktop replacement in King's Cross

Yes. King's Cross is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N1C, N1, NW1. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. 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 leave in one movement rather than piece by piece. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Services were designed in rather than added later, so waste and feeds come up where the drawing put them and the sink is not moving. The work is all in the building, not the kitchen. Old fixings come out of soft brick and better ones go in. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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.

Standing a three-metre length on end takes more headroom outside the car than inside it, and a low lobby ceiling is what actually stops it. 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. A stone top coming out whole needs the same crew as one going in. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Where the van must move, the waste goes on first.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. One plot replaced years on, matched or otherwise. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. 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.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Packing the carcasses is part of the replacement. Book the service lift, loading bay and concierge access for the full day, and confirm the building's permitted working hours in writing. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Wear is what the next inventory records.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Riser panels, wall boxes and the boiler cupboard sit in fixed positions the developer will not move for a worktop. 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 units are relevelled before anything new is bedded.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. 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. 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.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. 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. It usually explains the odd filler piece or strip of beading in the existing run that nobody could account for. Found at template, not on fit day.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through 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.