Worktop replacement in Gloucester Road

Yes. Gloucester Road is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW7. It is run from the New Malden side, covering South West London & Surrey. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. It is a full day at the kerb, not a delivery. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

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. Sound carcasses are the one condition. Old service lifts are the hard limit on this street - if the car will not take it, the joint gets designed around the lift, not around the kitchen.

Blocks here have a front porter's desk and a separate tradesman's entrance round the side, and materials go in the service lift only, with protective blankets on the walls. The lifts are old, often around 1000mm by 1300mm internally with a low car ceiling, which caps a stood-on-edge slab at roughly 2.2-2.4m unless the stairs are used instead. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going 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. That is agreed before a plumber is booked. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop templating and worktop installation. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. Sound carcasses or it does not go ahead. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. Old tops out in the morning, new stone down and sealed the same afternoon. A plumber either side of us.

Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. Going from a 38mm laminate to 20mm or 30mm stone drops the surface, which shows against tiles, a window board and any freestanding appliance. Height change is checked before we cut. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The old top has been hiding it, so the first honest look at it happens when the laminate comes off. The laminate has been covering it up. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. If the carcasses are tired the honest answer is that stone will find that out, and it is better said before than after. Units kept, surface changed.