Worktop replacement in St James's

Yes. St James's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1A, SW1Y. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Where a road is shut for filming or for works the diversion adds distance to the carry even when parking itself was never the problem. 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 waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A basement kitchen has a flagged or concrete floor laid straight onto the ground, so it is solid, cold and rarely within ten millimetres of level. In most Victorian terraces the kitchen sits in the back addition, so you get a narrow galley with one outside wall and nothing square to work off. What is under the old top is the real question. 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. 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.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. 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. Streets near a ground or a venue have restrictions that come and go with the fixture list rather than with the time of day. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Both loads want the same few metres of kerb.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication and 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. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A deposit deduction rarely covers a new top.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The shape is measured again, not copied off the old top. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Strip-out and fit inside one access window.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. 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 beading was covering a bowed wall.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Laminate hides what the gables are really doing.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. A corner that was butted can be mitred this time.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Where there is no room for a separate drainer, grooves are usually what gets specified instead. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. 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.