Worktop fabrication in Fortune Green

Yes. Fortune Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW6, NW2. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. That is the last thing settled before dispatch. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Infill plots usually put the kitchen at the back with wide doors to a small garden, and that opening is the best route in. Piece size is set by the lift car, not by the slab. A settled corner leaves the bench as a real angle. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Cut oversize on purpose, every time.

A pendant light hanging in the middle of a hall ceiling sets the angle a piece can be tilted to, and it is the measurement nobody thinks to take. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A join added for access is placed over a gable, never mid-span. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole 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.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. New-build kitchens are usually smaller than the plan suggests once the appliances are in, so the usable run is shorter than the drawn run. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Small kitchens are more bench work per square metre. Buyers upgrading before handover work to a choices deadline set by the sales office rather than by the build programme. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Cut for the slot, because the slot will not move.

Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. 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. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The relief comes out of the slab, not the fitter. 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. One owner can take a date next week while the flat below needs three weeks of notice, so several kitchens in one building end up scheduled by the slowest permission. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. One batch wherever the specification repeats.

The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. The lift car, the loading bay and the building manager decide the piece sizes here, not the slab. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Cut-outs are set out from the units, not the appliance box.

Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The house is designed to the width it was allowed, so the kitchen is long and narrow and the run has no real choice about where it goes. The lift diagonal governs the longest piece, so the join count is fixed at nesting and cannot be revisited on the day. Nothing is machined square because a plan says square.

The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A hall that widens further in is still only as good as its tightest point, and that point is usually within a metre of the front door. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The drawing states a maximum length and the shop honours it.

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. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. One leg of an L is nearly always the working run and the other little more than a landing space, but both are templated, cut and edged to the same standard. 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.