Worktop replacement in Merton Park

Yes. Merton Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW19. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. 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. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

Handmade brick and lime plaster move visibly along a run, and a straight-cut back edge shows it immediately. 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. Same units, straighter line, better surface. 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 laminate has been covering it up.

Booked delivery windows on a managed estate run to an hour, and a worktop install does not happen inside an hour. 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. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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 really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would 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 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 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. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Nothing else in the room has to change.

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. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The units stay, the surface changes. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

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. Found at template, not on fit day. 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. Where two people share the decision it helps to know early which of them is settling the edge profile and which is settling the budget, because it is rarely the same person for both. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Nothing to reseal is the point in a let.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The carcasses stay. Only the surface changes. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Two loads share the one space here, the old tops waiting to go and the new stone waiting to come in. The van has to stand through both halves of the day.

How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. 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. A surface swap is the fastest upgrade available on a kitchen that is otherwise sound. A day, not a project.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Carcasses have to be sound first.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. These are the multi-piece jobs, where vein direction across a join matters as much as the join itself. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. A twenty-year-old run is replaced to its own shape.