Worktop replacement in Moorgate

Yes. Moorgate is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2M, EC2Y. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. 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 waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

A former office building converted to flats has deep floorplates, so kitchens end up in internal rooms with no external wall at all. Housings set out for a 38mm laminate change clearance when you drop to 20mm or 30mm stone, and that is checked before cutting. A new top on a settled run needs the run corrected first. Where a peninsula returns into a stud wall the load has to sit on the units, with the wall doing no more than steadying it. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The old cut-out was hiding the notch you now need.

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. It decides whether the old top leaves whole. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. Both loads want the same few metres of kerb.

It is inside the three we do most here, under worktop installation. Either way: same template, same workshop, same fitters. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Nothing else in the room has to change. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A day, not a project.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Appliance gaps are checked against the new thickness. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Levels get corrected before the new top is measured. Book the service lift, loading bay and concierge access for the full day, and confirm the building's permitted working hours in writing. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. The gap between tenancies is the whole window.

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. Disposal means it goes in the van, not into the garden to wait for a collection. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Half a day of parking buys half a job.

Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. Same footprint, different tolerances.

A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The island top is the one that may want its own slab.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. 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. Level the units first, measure the shape second.