Worktop replacement in Rise Park

Yes. Rise Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are RM1. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Havering. Where the drive is too short for the van the back end overhangs the footway, and a footway is a route people are using rather than spare space. 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. A suspension for the full day beats half a day lost. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen sits at the rear with a back door beside it, so the carry is short and comes in from the garden rather than through the house. 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. Units kept, surface changed, one day. 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. What is behind the old top decides the day.

A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. 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. A stone top coming out whole needs the same crew as one going in. Having the van on the drive means the load can be staged, so the heavy pieces come off last and go straight in instead of standing outside. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Nothing goes out until the route back to the van is clear.

It is on the short list of three for this patch, with worktop installation first. Same template, same workshop, same fitters whichever it is. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Old runs are rarely square, and stone will not forgive it. Material is £110-£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. The beading was covering a bowed wall. 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. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Notice goes out before the crew is booked.

The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. These were built with a coal store and an outside lavatory off the back, and where those got absorbed into the kitchen the walls around them are thinner and later. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. How old the kitchen is decides how long preparation takes.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Where the seam went before is not where it goes now.

Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Solid walls with no cavity have often been dry-lined internally at some point, and the lining thickness varies from wall to wall. The recess is measured again once the old top is out, since the original fit was often cut to whatever it found. What is under the old top is the real question.

The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Stone wants gables where laminate needed none.