Worktop replacement in North Cray

Yes. North Cray is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. 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. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Lime plaster over rubble moves in and out enough that a single long panel will show a gap somewhere along its length. Any island overhang past about 300mm will not carry weight on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or brackets have to be let into the units first, and that is agreed at template stage, not on fit day. Chipboard that has taken water will not take stone. Where a column lands in the run the template plots its actual outline so the stone is cut to fit around it rather than stopped short and filled. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. What passed for a fit in chipboard will not pass in stone.

Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. 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. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. 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 units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A day, not a project. 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 carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A void week is the entire schedule.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Height change is checked before we cut. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Exposed structure means the back edge is not a straight line at all, and a scribe of fifteen or twenty millimetres across a run is normal. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Taking the top off is what exposes the floor. Have a fitter or joiner fix and level the island units beforehand, and get the sink, taps, hob and any range on site before templating so we cut to the actual appliances. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Programme work takes the flats in sequence.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A deep scribe comes out of the nest, so how far the stone has to be relieved changes which part of the slab the piece is cut from. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The old cut-out was hiding the notch you now need.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. A range or an Aga in an original recess is usually immovable, so the run is designed around it and the clearances come from the appliance. The old island top is frequently sitting on units that were never fixed down, which is fine for laminate and not for stone. The floor has dropped since the kitchen went in.

A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. A utility or boot room usually takes a second run of stone, templated with the kitchen and fitted after 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. A single day, planned properly.

Join count is a question about slab size and run length, nothing else. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Same shape, different cut list.