Worktop fabrication in Gospel Oak

Yes. Gospel Oak is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW5, NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. A short window means one pass, so the rack suits one pass. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Ceilings are high in these, so wall unit heights and splashback heights are open choices rather than things the room has already decided. The galley run down a side-return usually measures longer than a slab will give us, so a join is designed in from the start and nested to land over a cabinet gable rather than wherever the material happens to run out. Walls out of plumb are cut for at the bench. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Cut oversize on purpose, every time.

A rated load sounds ample until three lengths of granite and two fitters are standing on it, so the stone goes up one piece at a time. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A lift diagonal is a workshop dimension as much as a site one. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The crate spec follows the length of the carry.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Cut for the slot, because the slot will not move. 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. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. The batch is checked against itself before it leaves.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Book-matched pieces are cut adjacent or not at all. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. 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. The sink and hob need to be on site and the run layout fixed before we start cutting, because moving a hob after the join position is set means recutting the whole piece. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Nothing is cut before the signature comes back.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. Where the walls have been dry-lined over the old lath there is a void behind the board and no solid fixing until a batten is found. 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.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A tap under a window board still needs room for its handle to lift, which is checked at the template. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. A recut loses the sequence for good.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. A run that stops in mid-air at the open end needs a finished end rather than a cut one, and that end takes the same edge work as the whole front. Every piece is drawn onto the slab before anything is cut, so the veining and the join positions are decided together rather than one after the other. Every piece is labelled to its place in the run.

Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. The bay at the front and the back addition at the rear were built to different standards, and the kitchen is nearly always in the weaker of the two. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Thin partitions get shallower overhangs, decided in the shop.