Worktop fabrication in Hither Green

Yes. Hither Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE13, SE12. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Without a bay the van ends up on a single yellow with a crew member watching it, which takes a pair of hands off the carry. 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. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The original larder or store cupboard usually survives in a corner, and that alcove is deeper than the units and squarer than the walls around it. 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. What the wall does is on the drawing before the saw runs. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. A square internal corner is a crack waiting.

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. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The crate is built to the same measurement. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. The van is packed to suit the walk at the other end.

Often enough. It is one of the three, behind worktop installation. The template, the workshop and the installers are the same either way. 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. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Same slab run, or it is not a match. 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. Proven on the bench before dispatch.

Three stools along one side need more clear length than most plans allow, and once the seating depth is fixed the piece either grows or it loses a seat. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. One setting serves both halves of a mitre. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Oversize on the scribe edge, always. 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. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. Changing an appliance after the nest is set means recutting the piece, not adjusting it. A repeated specification comes off one batch.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. Units have to be fixed down as well as levelled. A loose carcass moves under stone. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. The radius goes in at the bench, not on site.

An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Rear rooms of this date have a wide sash or a pair of garden doors, so a good deal of the wall the run wants is glass. 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. Lath and plaster is cut for, never cut into.

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 join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Where an overhang is too deep for steel on its own the choice is a leg at the end or a bracket underneath, and a bracket that lands where a knee goes is worse than no bracket at all. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. The saw follows the nest, not the floor plan.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. It also decides where in the slab the piece is taken from, because a deep relief needs material behind it that a straight edge never asks for. A deep relief needs material left behind it.