Worktop replacement in Victoria

Yes. Victoria is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1E, SW1P. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. A dedicated loading bay or service yard is the easiest arrangement in a managed building, provided the slot is booked and someone has the key to the shutter. 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 old tops leave in one movement rather than piece by piece. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The lift is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a turn at every half-landing. A mansion block is a logistics job before it is a stone job. A new top on a settled run needs the run corrected first. Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. 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.

Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. 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. The route is protected once and then used four times. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Where the van must move, the waste goes on first.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Cam-lock carcasses get braced before stone lands. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Housings set out for laminate are checked first.

A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Old runs are rarely square, and stone will not forgive it. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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. Get the managing agent's or freeholder's approval and the permitted hours confirmed beforehand, and agree with the porter who protects the communal carpet, stonework and lift. 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. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Nothing to reseal is the point in a let.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. 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.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. External walls are thick and the run under the window sits in a deep reveal that has to be templated rather than assumed square. A full stone piece is several times the weight of the laminate coming out, and there is rarely room to turn it on a half-landing. The fabric gets checked while it is open.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Dark and heavily veined stone shows a join more than a pale even one, which is worth knowing before the slab is picked. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Walls at both ends mean two scribes on every piece, and a run that has to drop between two fixed points has no tolerance left to give away. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Where the seam went before is not where it goes now.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A builder-finish kitchen upgrades in a morning.