Worktop replacement in Lots Road

Yes. Lots Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. 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. Loading out is loading in, done in reverse and heavier. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Poured screed over steel decking can fall away across a long run, so level is checked across the whole room before anything is packed. Converted warehouses put the kitchen against original brick or blockwork that has never been made flat, so scribes of 15 to 20mm along a run are normal and every piece is templated to the wall exactly as it is rather than to a drawing. A new top on a settled run needs the run corrected first. Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The alcove was never square and it still is not.

Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into 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. Timing the two carries is most of the planning. On an event day the controls are wider, tighter and enforced harder than the signage suggests on any other morning of the week. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Two carries in one day doubles what the distance costs.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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 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. 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. Booked at short notice, because the notice is short.

It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. A run that flexed under laminate gets support now. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. What passed for a fit in chipboard will not pass in stone. Book the goods lift and loading bay for the day, clear a straight route through the open plan, and have a plumber on hand for the island services coming up through the floor. A let property is specified for durability and for a fixed window, and both of those are legitimate reasons to choose differently. 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.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. Taking the top off is what exposes the floor.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. 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 room is cleared for the way out as much as the way in.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. Some of them overhang on two sides at once, and each side is worked out separately, because the load on an edge people lean against is not the load on an edge people walk past. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Appliance gaps are checked against the new thickness.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. Ceilings are high and there are usually no wall units, so a splashback runs to whatever height is decided rather than to a cupboard. Where brickwork bows enough that a full-depth piece cannot go back tight, the units move forward and the front overhang changes. The fabric gets checked while it is open.