Worktop replacement in Monument

Yes. Monument is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC3R. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Old stone is heavier going out than it looked coming in. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

External walls are thick and the run under the window sits in a deep reveal that has to be templated rather than assumed square. A mansion block is a logistics job before it is a stone job. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The sill was always low. Nobody had to care until now.

Where the stairwell is narrow enough that the stone travels on edge the polished face runs within an inch of the plaster, so the walls get boarded as well as the steps. 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. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. 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 van has to stand through both halves of the day.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop splashbacks & upstands. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Same day, because the void is the whole budget. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Repairable in place beats replaced whole.

A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The shape is measured again, not copied off the old top. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. A straight swap is the exception in an older room. Get the managing agent's or freeholder's approval and the permitted hours confirmed beforehand, and agree with the porter who protects the communal carpet, stonework and lift. 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. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. The gap between tenancies is the whole window.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Laminate hides what the gables are really doing.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. A one-hour window will not hold a two-way job.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. The shape is already there to be measured, which makes the template straightforward and leaves the strip-out as the part that actually needs planning. A corner that was butted can be mitred this time.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Permitted working hours, a porter and a booked lift set a hard finish time on the day whatever stage the fit has reached. 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 wall behind the old top is rarely the wall on the drawing.