Worktop replacement in Woolwich

Yes. Woolwich is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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 have to go somewhere as well. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

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. 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. Everything the last fit ignored is visible for a morning. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The stack was boxed in after the kitchen went in.

Pieces get staged in the ground floor lobby and sent up singly, which needs somewhere to stand them where nobody will walk into them. 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. Both movements are planned as one. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. 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. Access out counts as much as access in.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop splashbacks & upstands. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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 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 carcasses have to be sound, because stone is several times the weight of what is coming off. One plot replaced years on, matched or otherwise.

A breakfast bar on the outer side is an overhang like any other, and the support under it is sized for people leaning on the end rather than for the weight of the stone alone. The existing layout is being kept, so the question is whether the old carcasses will take stone in that shape without more support. Where the seam went before is not where it goes now. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. This is the commonest reason a replacement turns out to need more than a straight swap. A postformed top swallowed the fall. This will not. 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. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. A replacement keeps the units and changes the surface, which is the least disruptive way to do this in an occupied property. Expected downtime beats discovered downtime.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. The step and the gap at the car threshold catch a trolley wheel, so the piece comes off the trolley and goes in by hand. We plan the strip-out and the carry as one movement so the kitchen is only out of use for a single day. The old top leaves by the route the new one arrives on.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A peninsula projects into circulation space, so its outer corners usually take a radius rather than a point, and that radius is agreed at template rather than assumed. Old laminate has often been holding a run square for years, and taking it off shows what the units were really doing. Stone wants gables where laminate needed none.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. Machining is permanent. If a later kitchen moves the sink, the grooves stay where they were cut. The rear wall of the addition carries both the back door and the window, which leaves very little unbroken wall for a run to sit against. The units stay and only the surface changes, so the job is a day, and what makes it a difficult day is the building. Nothing new goes down until the run reads level end to end.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. 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 shell is the constant here; the surface is not.