Worktop replacement in Mile End

Yes. Mile End is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E1, E3. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Tower Hamlets. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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 skip on the frontage takes the space the van needed. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Electrics went in at conversion, some in surface trunking and some chased into lath and plaster, so no cable route in these rooms is safe to assume. 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. What is under the old top is the real question. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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.

Open-tread and cantilevered stairs give nothing to lean a piece against, so the whole weight stays on the crew for the full length of the flight. 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. Cutting a top down indoors means emptying the room first. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. The waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. The flat earns nothing while it sits empty. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Same day, because the void is the whole budget.

Where a run finishes hard against a wall the last few millimetres are scribed, and where it finishes in open floor it is cut square and polished, which is two different jobs on one length. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The units stay, the surface changes. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. 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 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Owners phase this work; a void period cannot.

The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. A handrail that has to come off before a piece will pass is twenty minutes at the start of the day, and it goes back on the wall before we leave. 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. Out and in happen along the same protected route.

The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. 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. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Both loads want the same few metres of kerb.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. 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 cut-outs rarely match where the new appliances go.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Carcasses have to be sound first.