Worktop fabrication in Dulwich Village

Yes. Dulwich Village is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE21. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The strapping answers to the walk, not the drive. The measuring and the fitting are both done at the property, so there is nothing to visit or collect.

Ceiling heights dropped after the war, so there is less wall between the worktop and the wall units than in anything older. These have a back door straight into the kitchen so getting pieces in is rarely the issue, but the room is small and the runs are short, which puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on a single length of stone. The saw follows the template, never the plan. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Left and right alcove pieces are marked and stay marked.

Where the garden is level and the back door is wide the pieces get staged outside on trestles and brought in one at a time as the fitters are ready for them. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The drawing carries that decision through to the saw. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Stacking order is a parking decision here.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Yield is what makes batching worth doing at all. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do.

It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Long lengths go down first, short pieces fill around them. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. A relief that deep changes how the piece is lifted. Final appliance positions and the actual sink and hob need to be settled before machining, because on a run this short a few centimetres of movement decides whether the piece can be cut in one. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. A verbal change is not an instruction.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. It is settled on the bench, not on site.

A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it.

The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Plaster over blockwork is thin and hollow in patches, so anything fixed back to the wall needs a sound spot found first. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Cut to the room, not to a rectangle.

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. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Post-war terraces have a short straight hall to the kitchen, which is a good deal kinder than the houses they replaced. The bench work is about keeping enough solid material between them - a hob cut-out too near a sink cut-out leaves a narrow bridge that will not survive being lifted, so we either move the appliance positions on the template or split the run and put a join over a gable between the two cut-outs. What leaves the bench is what fits the room.