Worktop fabrication in Bank

Yes. Bank is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2R, EC3V. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load plan follows from it. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Underfloor heating in the screed means nothing is fixed into the floor, so an island is anchored to the carcasses alone. We work to the internal depth of the car and the diagonal you can actually stand a piece up on with the doors closed, then nest to that, which routinely turns a two-piece kitchen into a three-piece one with an extra join over a gable. A settled corner leaves the bench as a real angle. Dot-and-dab plasterboard sounds solid and is hollow behind, so anything fixed through it has to hit a dab or a batten rather than a void. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The drawing decides it, not the fitter.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The maximum piece is written on the drawing in millimetres. 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. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Yield is what makes batching worth doing at all. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Taped internal angles in plasterboard belly at the corner, so the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm and a plan-angle mitre will not close. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Machined to the real line. Sink, tap and hob need to be with us before machining, along with confirmation of whether the island is getting a breakfast overhang, since anything past roughly 300mm unsupported needs steel let into the carcasses and that has to be built in, not added later. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Late changes are priced rather than absorbed quietly.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Where a partition has been built off the floor screed rather than off the slab, it moves, and a mitre bonded across that corner is the first thing to open. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. Cut oversize on purpose, every time.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Ceiling heights are held to the minimum the plan allows, so the panel between worktop and wall units is a short piece. The lift diagonal governs the longest piece, so the join count is fixed at nesting and cannot be revisited on the day. Nothing is machined square because a plan says square.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. 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. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Dry-assembled to the shape of your run.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Every flat on the floor is the same plan handed left and right, so the room is predictable even where the building is not. Socket cut-outs in a full-height panel are machined to measured back-box positions rather than to the developer layout. The shell decides the piece; the slab decides only the yield.