Worktop fabrication in Hadley Wood

Yes. Hadley Wood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EN4. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. A drive behind an electric gate depends on somebody being in to open it and on the gate staying open while the load comes off. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Nothing gets buried behind something it has to follow off. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The kitchen is a rear service room with a scullery and a larder off it, and both have usually survived as separate spaces. Access is off a drive and through wide doors, so for once the piece size is not the constraint - the joins that go in are the ones we choose for layout and veining, not the ones the building forces. 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. Left and right alcove pieces are marked and stay marked.

The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Nesting follows the route, not the other way round. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. A short window means one pass, so the rack suits one pass.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. The batch is checked against itself before it leaves. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Ten metres of upstand out of what the tops left.

A downdraught extractor takes a long slot out of the middle of the piece and a motor housing out of the cabinet below it, so what sits under the top is settled before anything is cut. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Apron mitres are bonded and polished before dispatch. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

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. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. A relief that deep changes how the piece is lifted. The range or Aga, the sink and the tap all need to be confirmed by model before nesting, because their clearances and hole positions set where the island can be cut. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Recut time comes out of the access window.

Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Wide doors, generous rooms and somewhere to park mean the joins that go in are the ones we choose, not the ones the building forces. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Every piece is numbered to the wall it belongs against.

Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. Ask for the lines rather than the total. One number for a kitchen tells you nothing you can check. No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Cut to the plotted line, not the nominal one.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Power and waste come up through the floor, and where they surface decides which cabinet can hold a sink and which one cannot. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Seams land over gables, never over a void.

Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. 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. One setting serves both halves of a mitre.