Worktop fabrication in Castelnau

Yes. Castelnau is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW13. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. The realistic answer on a main road is an early slot, a spotter on the van and pieces staged in one movement rather than several trips. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit 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. Every join over a gable, clear of every cut-out. Tall rooms tempt full-height slab splashbacks, and at 2.4m plus these become the heaviest single piece on the job - plan the lift for the splashback, not the top.

The road is a busy artery towards the bridge with red-route style restrictions at peak, so unloading happens in the side turnings; villa front gardens are short with a flight of steps up to a raised entrance. Piece length is set by the internal diagonal of the lift car, not by the length of the slab. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The drawing carries that decision through to the saw.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop splashbacks & upstands. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. 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. Proven on the bench before dispatch. 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. Nested for the job in front of us.

Seating overhangs past roughly 300mm will not carry on the carcass alone, so flat steel bar or a plywood substrate has to be built into the units first. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Machined to the real line. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Dry-assembled before it leaves.