Worktop fabrication in Falconwood

Yes. Falconwood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA16, SE9. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. The distance from the standing to the actual kitchen door is the number that counts, since plenty of drives finish at a side gate and a garden path. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The van is packed to suit the walk at the other end. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The consumer unit and the meter tails often sit in a cupboard in the corner of the kitchen, and that cupboard has to stay reachable whatever goes in around it. Most of these have a side passage and a back door, so a full-length piece can usually reach the kitchen without being cut down, and the piece sizing is driven by the slab rather than the route. The bench proves it before the van moves. 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. The measured wall angle travels to the saw.

A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. A timed unload is planned into the rack before it leaves.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. 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. 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. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Small kitchens are more bench work per square metre.

An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The corner is proven on the bench first. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Yield drops the moment the back edge stops being straight. The peninsula end detail needs deciding up front - square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall - because a waterfall end has to be cut in sequence off the same part of the slab as the top. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Cutouts are checked against the actual appliances, whoever bought them.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Where the return runs into a wall that is out of square, the corner is templated as the angle it really is rather than as ninety degrees. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Yield is worked on the slab, not on a calculator.

A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. A mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. The return is nested first, because it fits worst.

No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. A radiator sits under the rear window on the outside wall, and moving it is plumbing that belongs before the template rather than after it. What does drive the bench work is the knocked-through kitchen-diner: the return worktop and any peninsula are seen end-on from the dining side, so we nest the pieces so the veining carries across the internal corner in the same direction rather than turning through ninety degrees. Every join over a gable, clear of every cut-out.

Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Nothing gets buried behind something it has to follow off.