Worktop fabrication in Camberwell

Yes. Camberwell is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE5. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Where the permit is a digital session rather than a paper one, somebody in the house has to start it at the hour the van actually arrives. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Kerbside unloading is planned in the racking, not improvised at the door. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

The original range recess often survives as a shallow alcove with an iron lintel over it, a hundred millimetres deeper than the wall either side of it. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. What the shell demands is solved in the shop, not the kitchen. 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. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The piece is nested around the scribe, not despite it.

The top step is rarely the end of it, because a door swinging out onto the landing has to be held back before a piece can come off the flight. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Nesting follows the route, not the other way round. A resident bay and a shared-use bay can sit on the same street under different rules, and it is usually the shared one a visitor permit or a ticket touches. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. The load plan follows from it.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. The spares are cut while the slab is still open. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. One kept offcut saves a whole flat later.

A corbel on show under an overhang is a decision about how the piece looks from a stool, so it gets settled alongside the edge profile rather than left to whoever fits it. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Yield is worked on the slab, not on a calculator. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

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. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Nothing leaves the bench expecting a square wall. The sink and hob need to be on site and the run layout fixed before we start cutting, because moving a hob after the join position is set means recutting the whole piece. 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. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. We check who is entitled to approve it.

The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Radiused, polished, and clear of the joins.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The crate is built to the same measurement.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Repeat pieces are cut from one drawing set, so what arrives on the bench is the same every time. Repeat runs come off a jig, not a fresh setout.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. An external stair, a side return or a rear garden counts as carry and is measured the same way. Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. A piece is cut to the turn it has to clear.