Worktop fabrication in Campden Hill

Yes. Campden Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W8. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. That is the last thing settled before dispatch. Template and fit both happen at the property, so there is nothing to drive to and nothing to collect.

Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. 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. The shell decides the piece; the slab decides only the yield. A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. 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 measured wall angle travels to the saw.

A short run of external steps before the communal door means a piece is lifted twice before the staircase proper has even started. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Nesting follows the route, not the other way round. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Loaded for the carry, not for the van.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. The spares are cut while the slab is still open. 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. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. One kept offcut saves a whole flat later.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

A cill projecting forward of the plaster line pushes the back edge out, and the units then stand off the wall by that amount for the whole length. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Yield drops the moment the back edge stops being straight. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Recut time comes out of the access window.

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. Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Where the sill lands inside the height an upstand would occupy there is no upstand, and the stone either dies into the reveal or stops short of it. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Left and right alcove pieces are marked and stay marked.

A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Rooms are tall with deep window reveals, and a run finishing into a reveal is templated to it rather than assumed square. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Walls out of plumb are cut for at the bench.

The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. Lath and plaster, a settled floor and a hall with a turn in it are the three things that decide how this job runs. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. Vein direction is chosen across the joins, not within a piece.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. The rest of the kitchen still goes in. One damaged piece does not hold up the pieces either side. The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. 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.