Worktop replacement in Muswell Hill

Yes. Muswell Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N10. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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 old tops have to go somewhere as well. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceilings are high in these, so wall unit heights and splashback heights are open choices rather than things the room has already decided. Lath-and-plaster and bowed brickwork mean we template for scribes rather than straight cuts, and each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped straight down. The floor has dropped since the kitchen went in. A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Found at template, not on fit day.

Every flight adds a set of handling movements, and handling is where stone gets damaged, so a fourth-floor walk-up is priced by the flight rather than by the metre. 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. Out and in happen along the same protected route. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. 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. Access out counts as much as access in.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. 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. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A day, not a project.

Knee room under a breakfast bar is measured from the face of the cabinets rather than from the edge of the stone, so a deep apron quietly eats the depth somebody actually gets to sit in. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The island top is the one that may want its own slab. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

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. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. It is the usual surprise, and it is a known one. 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. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. 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.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. It was there long before we were.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. The bay at the front and the back addition at the rear were built to different standards, and the kitchen is nearly always in the weaker of the two. What the old top has been hiding is usually a floor that settled towards the back and units that were never fixed back to the wall. Whatever the shell has done since is dealt with now.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. It usually explains the odd filler piece or strip of beading in the existing run that nobody could account for. The old top hid it. The drawing will not.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. What changes is the surface. The carcasses underneath stay where they are. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Where the household has used up the visitor permits it gets for the year, the remaining options are a suspension or a paid bay and both belong on the quote. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Waste needs a space of its own and the street rarely offers one.