Worktop fabrication in Chelsea Harbour

Yes. Chelsea Harbour is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. 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. Stacking order is a parking decision here. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Entry-phone access, a booked lift and a parking bay near the entrance all have to be arranged before a date is confirmed. The kitchen is usually a small square or L-shaped room reached through a narrow entrance lobby and a standard internal doorway, so the limit on piece length is the turn out of the lobby, and short runs mean joins are often avoidable altogether if the layout is nested tightly. The piece is made for the room the builders left. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. A deep relief needs material left behind it.

Goods lifts and passenger lifts fail differently: one has a rated load that matters, the other has a door aperture that matters more. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A remake is the price of guessing that measurement. 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. The van is packed to suit the walk at the other end.

It is inside the three we do most here, under worktop replacement. Either way: same template, same workshop, same fitters. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Proven on the bench before dispatch. Landlord work is scheduled around void periods, so the whole thing is a fixed window and the template date matters as much as the fitting date. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Nested for the job in front of us.

A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The return is nested first, because it fits worst. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The notch is machined, never ground in later. The stack boxing needs to be in its final form and the sink and hob on site before we machine, since a boxing that gets re-clad afterwards throws the notch out. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Join positions belong to whoever signed.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. The original plan had one sink position, and moving it means taking a waste through a wall that does not want to be cut. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. An old house eats more slab than a new one.

Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. A plan-angle mitre closes on paper only.

Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. 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. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. It also decides where in the slab the piece is taken from, because a deep relief needs material behind it that a straight edge never asks for. The measured wall angle travels to the saw.

Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. 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. The kitchen is a narrow room off the hall with the window at the far end, so the run is a galley by construction rather than by choice. The notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius, because a square internal corner there is where a top fails. A settled corner leaves the bench as a real angle.