Worktop replacement in West Barnes

Yes. West Barnes is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW20, KT3. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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 waste leaves with us, so the van has to still be there. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

The larder had a slate or terrazzo shelf on its cold wall, heavy enough that it usually got left in place when everything else went. The kitchen is normally the original back room with a later side-return or rear extension bolted on, and that helps us: most pieces can go down the side alley and in through the back door in one length, so we can avoid joins that a front-door route would force. The old top hid it; the new one will not. An alcove is commonly wider at the back than at the front, so a piece cut to the opening drops in and then stands off the rear wall. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. A postformed top swallowed the fall. This will not.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. 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. Nothing new comes down a hall still full of old top. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. We stage the strip-out so the old tops leave in one trip rather than trickling out across the afternoon. Both loads want the same few metres of kerb.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop fabrication. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the whole job is one day rather than a kitchen refit. Housings set out for laminate are checked first. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. The carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. A builder-finish kitchen upgrades in a morning.

The two runs are read against each other rather than against the floor, so they are set to one datum taken across the aisle instead of measured up from the boards. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. 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.

The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. 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. Unlock the side gate and clear the alley of bins, bikes and pots, and arrange a plumber for the sink and an electrician if the hob is hard-wired. 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. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Owners phase this work; a void period cannot.

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. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. 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.

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. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. 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. A laminate top was scribed thin at the back to swallow it, and stone cannot be shaved down the same way. Taking the top off is what exposes the floor.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. 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. A side door into a lobby with a cloakroom off it is the standard arrangement, so there is a second way in that misses the hall altogether. The recess is measured again once the old top is out, since the original fit was often cut to whatever it found. Same units, straighter line, better surface.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. The incoming main and the stopcock come up through the floor at the old scullery wall, so whatever unit stands over them has to stay removable. The cill over the sink is checked against the new upstand height before anything is cut. The wall behind the old top has not been seen in years.