Worktop replacement in Neasden

Yes. Neasden is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW10, NW2. It is worked on our north west London run, along with the rest of Brent. A dropped kerb wide enough for a car is not always wide enough for a long-wheelbase van, and the width of the crossing decides the rest. 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 one-hour window will not hold a two-way job. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The chimney breast served a back boiler and is usually still standing, so there is a shallow recess on one side of the room. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not. Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. 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. Half a day can go on the strip-out where the way in is tight. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the 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. The strip-out waits until the new stone has somewhere to stand.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop installation. Whichever it is, the template and the fitters do not change. 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 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. 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. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A day, not a project.

A dishwasher door on one side and an oven door on the other cannot both stand open in a narrow aisle, so which appliance goes where matters more in this shape than in any other. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Carcasses have to be sound first. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. It was there long before we were. Unlock the side gate and clear the alley of bins, bikes and pots, and arrange a plumber for the sink and an electrician if the hob is hard-wired. 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. Whoever owns the carcasses owns that call.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. Two runs and a return into a rear extension is the pattern, and the return is the piece that never nests neatly on a slab. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. The tiles above will want attention once the old top goes.

Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Stone cannot be filled and made good the way laminate can, so a damaged piece is remade rather than patched. Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. 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. Nothing new comes down a hall still full of old top.

Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A window at one end and a doorway at the other means one end of the run is lit from behind and the other is interrupted, so the two ends of the same length behave differently. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Height change is checked before we cut.

Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. 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. Same shape, different cut list.