Worktop fabrication in Coombe (Croydon)

Yes. Coombe (Croydon) is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Where a car has to come off the drive first, it is worth knowing whose car it is and whether the keys are in the house on the morning. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Loaded for the carry, not for the van. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen and the dining space share one room front to back, with the stair enclosure taking a bite out of one side of it. Piece size is set by the lift car, not by the slab. What leaves the bench is what fits the room. A lightweight stud partition will not carry a breakfast bar or a peninsula end, and stone finds that out faster than laminate ever did. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The relief comes out of the slab, not the fitter.

Estate roads are often too tight for a long-wheelbase van to turn, so the carry starts a good deal further from the door than a map suggests. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A piece is cut to the turn it has to clear. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. The strapping answers to the walk, not the drive.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do. Developer-fitted kitchens come with thin cam-lock carcasses, which are fine under laminate and want bracing before stone goes on them. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. The annexe top comes off the main kitchen slab.

On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Veining is matched across the seam before cutting starts. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

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. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Geometry first, then the saw. 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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Dry-assembled before it leaves.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. An island is where this usually shows, standing free with no wall to level against. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. 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. 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 square internal corner is a crack waiting.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Stone cut to somebody else’s drawing cannot usefully be re-cut to yours. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Small kitchens are more bench work per square metre.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Marble is the one people underestimate. It is porous, like granite, and wants sealing. Windows are small and set to suit the elevation rather than the room, so most of the wall above the worktop is solid. 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. The bow in an old wall is cut for, not sanded out.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Long lengths go down first, short pieces fill around them.