Worktop replacement in St Mary Cray

Yes. St Mary Cray is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR5. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. A skip, a delivery lorry or a run of scaffolding takes the frontage the van needed, so the street is worth a look the day before rather than on the morning. 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. Where the van must move, the waste goes on first. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

The external wall is a concrete panel with a modest window, so the run under it sits in a shallow reveal with a hard cill. Ex-council flats and maisonettes are built in dense concrete and blockwork, so anything that has to be fixed back, such as brackets under a peninsula or support for an end panel, goes in with proper anchors and an SDS rather than plasterboard fixings. Everything the last fit ignored is visible for a morning. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. It was there long before we were.

A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. 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. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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 skip on the frontage takes the space the van needed.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop splashbacks & upstands. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. The doors are staying, so the colour answers to them. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Between tenancies is the only window there is.

Older houses put the boiler or the meter on one of the two walls, and whatever is boxed in around it sets the point where that run has to stop. 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. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The old top hid it. The drawing will not. Sort a parking bay or permit near the entrance, confirm the lift is in service and get us the door codes, and tell us about any asbestos survey on the flat before we start stripping out. Inventories record the condition of a kitchen at both ends of a tenancy, which is a practical argument for a surface that looks the same in its fifth year as its first. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Repeat flats take the same replacement specification.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Communal stairs get boarded and the handrail padded, and we walk the route with a tape before the first piece leaves the van. 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.

A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. 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.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Front doors off the deck open into a lobby barely wider than the door itself, and the turn out of it is a right angle. Anything that has to be held back goes into concrete with proper anchors rather than into a plug and a hope. The shell is the constant here; the surface is not.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. 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. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. A galley that is also the route to the back door is a corridor first and a kitchen second, and what the shape can take is set by the traffic going through it. The shape is already there to be measured, which makes the template straightforward and leaves the strip-out as the part that actually needs planning. A corner that was butted can be mitred this time.