Worktop replacement in Regent's Park

Yes. Regent's Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW1. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. 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. Half a day of parking buys half a job. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. 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. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not. 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. 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 fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. 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. A laminate run comes out easier than stone goes in. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. The carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. One flat out of use at a time. 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. Chosen against the doors that are staying.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The old cut-outs prove nothing. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Expected downtime beats discovered downtime.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. Injected damp courses and re-rendered lower walls leave the bottom metre standing proud of everything above 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. Door fronts and drawers get checked against the new thickness.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. Carcasses are checked for square and fixed back before a stone top goes on them. Nothing goes back on carcasses the building has pulled out of square.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. 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.

A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Listing and conservation conditions apply to a good number of these, which constrains what can be altered around the kitchen rather than what goes on top of the units. Each piece is offered up and eased in rather than dropped, because nothing in the room is straight enough to drop into. Units kept, surface changed, one day.