Worktop replacement in Stratford

Yes. Stratford is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E15. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Newham. An event-day suspension can override a bay that is perfectly usable the rest of the week, so a booked space gets checked again nearer the time. 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. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Where the kitchen has taken the bay, the end of the room is three facets of glass set at angles and there is no straight wall left to finish against. 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 the last fitter did to the wall shows up on strip-out. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. What is behind the old top decides the day.

Blankets on the walls and a board on the floor go in before the first piece, because a scratched car becomes a bill from the managing agent long after the kitchen is finished. 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. It sets what the day actually looks like. 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 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. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. 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. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. The fastest upgrade a sound kitchen has.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Laminate hides what the gables are really doing. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The beading was covering a bowed wall. 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. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Wear is what the next inventory records.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Cornice runs round the head of the wall, so the wall units stop under it and the splashback band is trapped between two things that are not going to move. 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. The units have settled with the floor and get re-levelled.

The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Material is quoted supply only and templating, fabrication and fitting sit on their own lines, so it is visible which part is stone and which is labour. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. 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. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. Strip out first, then measure what is actually there.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. 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. It usually explains the odd filler piece or strip of beading in the existing run that nobody could account for. The old carcasses are rarely level and never were.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. 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. A corner that was butted can be mitred this time.