Worktop replacement in Seven Sisters

Yes. Seven Sisters is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N15. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Haringey. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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. 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.

A flat over a shop is reached by a separate street door and a straight steep stair, and that stair is the whole access question. Post-war terraces have small, roughly square kitchens with a back door and a window in the middle of the run, so runs are short and joins are rare, but there are usually two corners and a window cill to work around in a couple of metres. Sound carcasses are the one condition. 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. Nothing about it is a discovery on fitting day.

Open-tread and cantilevered stairs give nothing to lean a piece against, so the whole weight stays on the crew for the full length of the flight. 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. Old pieces are carried out before new ones are carried in. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. 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. The carry happens twice here, so the distance counts twice.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. The flat earns nothing while it sits empty. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Same day, because the void is the whole budget.

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. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Any overhang gets underpinned first. 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. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The laminate was scribed thin. Stone cannot be. Empty the base units completely and have a plumber disconnect the sink, tap and any washing machine plumbed in under the worktop before we arrive. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Units stay, so the flat is usable that evening.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. What is behind the old top decides the day.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. The carcasses stay put. Only the surface changes. The tap and waste have to be disconnected by a plumber before we start and reconnected once the stone is in. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Booking the bay for the whole day is the honest plan.

Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. The stair from the street is narrow with a tight turn at the top, which caps piece length well below anything the run itself needs. The units are often 1970s or 80s and only around 500mm deep, so a standard 600mm stone top overhangs at the front and the doors and drawer fronts need checking against it. Off in the morning, on by the afternoon.

A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. If it is a decision for later, say so at the template: the match is a question about the batch. The structure below is commercial, so the floor is often timber over a shop ceiling and the load path under an island is worth thinking about. Chipboard carcasses under the sink swollen from a slow leak will not take stone and get replaced before fit day. Same units, straighter line, better surface.