Worktop replacement in Oakleigh Park

Yes. Oakleigh Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N20. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. 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 strip-out waits until the new stone has somewhere to stand. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The rear wall is usually a single brick thick and has been rendered, patched and re-rendered, so it bows in and out along the length of the run. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. Plaster comes away with the old upstands more often than not. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The old top hid it. The drawing will not.

A pendant light hanging in the middle of a hall ceiling sets the angle a piece can be tilted to, and it is the measurement nobody thinks to take. 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. The old top leaves by the route the new one arrives on. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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. Loading out is loading in, done in reverse and heavier.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. 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. 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 void week is the entire schedule. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A plumber either side of us.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Height change is checked before we cut. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. Nothing about it is a discovery on fitting day. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. One day out of use, agreed in advance.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. The quote is written from the template drawing. Before that it works from what you have described. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The laminate was scribed thin. Stone cannot be.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Deep original skirting is often left in behind the units, standing them off the wall, so the back edge of the stone is plotted where the carcasses actually sit. 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 building has kept moving; the new template catches up.

An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. What is behind the old top decides the day.

Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. A surface swap is the fastest upgrade available on a kitchen that is otherwise sound. The fastest upgrade a sound kitchen has.