Worktop replacement in Walthamstow Village

Yes. Walthamstow Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are E17. It is worked on our east London run, along with the rest of Waltham Forest. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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. Where the van must move, the waste goes on first. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Many have had the ground floor chimney breast removed to gain three hundred millimetres, and the gained strip is newer blockwork standing proud of the old plaster. 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. Old tops were scribed to a wall that has moved since. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. The alcove was never square and it still is not.

A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. 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. Half a day can go on the strip-out where the way in is tight. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. 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 fabrication. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. Cam-lock carcasses get braced before stone lands. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Housings set out for laminate are checked first.

A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. 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. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. We would rather find it at template than on the morning, which is why the templater looks behind the units. What passed for a fit in chipboard will not pass in stone. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Programme work takes the flats in sequence.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. A sound carcass takes stone; a soft one gets replaced first.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. 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.

Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. The staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. 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 bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. Taking the old tops off is also the first honest look at what has been going on underneath them. The wall behind the old top is rarely the wall on the drawing.