Worktop replacement in Peckham

Yes. Peckham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE15. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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 timed bay does not cover a strip-out and a fit. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A conversion takes kitchen waste to a stack added to the outside of the building, which fixes the sink position long before anyone draws a layout. 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 old top hid it; the new one will not. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. 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 route is protected once and then used four times. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. 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. Old stone is heavier going out than it looked coming in.

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. Four kitchens ordered together take one template visit and one delivery, and that is where the saving comes from rather than from a discount on the stone. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A deposit deduction rarely covers a new top. Rooms in a shared house are let individually, so the work has to be done around whoever is still living in the building. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Four flats, four days, no scaffold week.

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. Same shape, different cut list. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The old top hid it. The drawing will not. 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. Method statements, insurance certificates and named operatives are wanted before a crew is cleared to attend, all of which is routine when it is asked for a week out. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Two visits mean two people taking a day off.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. Nothing about it is a discovery on fitting day.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Floors are the original joists with a later acoustic layer laid over them, and that layer is not flat where it meets the doorways. 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. Same units, straighter line, better surface.

The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. 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. It usually explains the odd filler piece or strip of beading in the existing run that nobody could account for. The laminate was scribed thin. Stone cannot be.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. 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. The old cut-outs prove nothing.