Worktop replacement in Norwood Green

Yes. Norwood Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are UB2. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Ealing. Camera enforcement gives nobody the chance to explain, where an officer on foot at least sees a tail lift down and stone coming off it. 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. Waste needs a space of its own and the street rarely offers one. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

There is a chimney breast on each flank wall, and the one in the kitchen carried a boiler flue rather than a fireplace, so the recess beside it is shallow. 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. Old fixings come out of soft brick and better ones go in. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. It was there long before we were.

Where the parking court sits behind the block the carry crosses open ground and gets boarded, because loaded trolleys and block paving do not agree. 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. The old top leaves by the route the new one arrives on. Where a loading concession applies at all, it holds only while something is being carried, which makes it a way to unload rather than a way to park. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. A timed bay does not cover a strip-out and a fit.

Not especially, and pretending otherwise would be simple enough. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and worktop installation. It is a fact about the local housing rather than about the work. The job is quoted, cut and fitted the same way wherever on the patch it lands. 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. A void week is the entire schedule. 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 plumber either side of us.

Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Level the units first, measure the shape second. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The old top hid it. The drawing will not. 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. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. The plumber is booked by whoever holds the contract.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. Suspended floors at the front meet a solid slab in the extension somewhere in the middle, and the units sit across the change. 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.

Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Which side of the bowl they go is about how you stand at the sink, and it is settled before cutting. The rear extension is usually the newest and truest part of the building, so it is the older half of the kitchen that gives the trouble. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. Nothing new goes down until the run reads level end to end.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Nothing about it is a discovery on fitting day.

A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The units stay, the surface changes.