Worktop replacement in St Paul's

Yes. St Paul's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC4M. It is run from the Essex side, covering Essex & East London. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Old tops out and new stone in, both through the same gap. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The room is genuinely square and the units are plumb, so the visit is more about the building than about the kitchen. Housings set out for a 38mm laminate change clearance when you drop to 20mm or 30mm stone, and that is checked before cutting. Sound carcasses are the one condition. Stepped and setted paving around the cathedral will jar a trolley badly, so carry the last stretch on a frame rather than wheeling it over the flags.

The immediate cathedral surroundings are pedestrianised with bollards and stepped paving, so the van stops on a permitted street and the last 100m or more is on foot across paving that is unkind to a trolley. Service access to residential floors is usually shared with the commercial tenants and restricted to outside their delivery hours. Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. 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. That is agreed before a plumber is booked. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. A plumber either side of us. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Sound carcasses or it does not go ahead.

The catch with a galley is that both runs are seen end-on from the doorway, so any difference in overhang between the two reads immediately. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. The units stay, the surface changes. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. Found at template, not on fit day. Book the service lift, loading bay and concierge access for the full day, and confirm the building's permitted working hours in writing. Where the owner is not local, the decisions happen remotely, so photographs and a clear itemised drawing carry more weight than a showroom visit ever would. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Plumber either side of us.