Worktop replacement in Temple

Yes. Temple is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC4Y. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. Unrestricted does not mean empty, and a street that is clear at seven is usually full by nine. 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 waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Rear rooms of this date have a wide sash or a pair of garden doors, so a good deal of the wall the run wants is glass. 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. A new top on a settled run needs the run corrected first. Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. A filler strip is evidence, not decoration.

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. Nothing new comes down a hall still full of old top. 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. 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. Both loads want the same few metres of kerb.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop splashbacks & upstands. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Between tenancies is the only window there is. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. One plot replaced years on, matched or otherwise.

Waterfall ends are cut in sequence off the length either side of the top so the vein carries down the leg, and that sequence is gone the moment a piece has to be recut. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Any overhang gets underpinned first. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. The stack was boxed in after the kitchen went in. 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 ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Whoever lives there hears the timing first.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. Carcasses are checked for square and fixed back before a stone top goes on them. The fabric gets checked while it is open.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. Nothing in a house of this age is square, and the kitchen is usually the part that has been altered most often. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. The old top is heavy waste, and booked as waste.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Everything on an island is fed from underneath, extraction, a socket run, a hob and sometimes a waste, and each of them wants its hole before the top is bonded down. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. The shape is measured again, not copied off the old top.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Island units are rarely fixed to anything at first fix, so they get screwed to the floor and levelled against the perimeter run before the stone is measured at all. 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. Laminate hides what the gables are really doing.