Worktop replacement in St James Street

Yes. St James Street is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E17. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Waltham Forest. 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. The strip-out waits until the new stone has somewhere to stand. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Lease conditions and the other flats in the building decide when noisy work can happen, so the fitting day has a start and a finish that are not ours to set. 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. What the last fitter did to the wall shows up on strip-out. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The laminate was scribed thin. Stone cannot be.

A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. 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. Half a day can go on the strip-out where the way in is tight. 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. Loading out is loading in, done in reverse and heavier.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop splashbacks & upstands. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Repairable in place beats replaced whole. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A deposit deduction rarely covers a new top.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. The shape is measured again, not copied off the old top. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. What is behind the old top decides the 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Strip-out and fit inside one access window.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. Original quarry tile is often still down under two or three later floor coverings, which is why the finished floor height is rarely what anyone expects. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. An old kitchen has moved, and the stone is cut to that.

Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. 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. Nothing new comes down a hall still full of old top.

On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. Visitor permits are issued to the household rather than to the trade, so the ones the day needs come from the customer and are best in hand the week before. Two loads share the one space here, the old tops waiting to go and the new stone waiting to come in. Two carries in one day doubles what the distance costs.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A short run of external steps before the communal door means a piece is lifted twice before the staircase proper has even started. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. The route is protected once and then used four times.