Worktop fabrication in Hurlingham

Yes. Hurlingham is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW6. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. We pack for the tail lift we are actually going to use. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The rear extension is frequently original rather than added, which means it is solidly built and just as far out of square as the rest of the house. 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. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Oversize on the scribe edge, always.

Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Edge profiles are finished before the stone is ever stood on end. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. A long walk from the van earns heavier corner protection.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. 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. Proven on the bench before dispatch. 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. Nested for the job in front of us.

The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. One setting serves both halves of a mitre. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The radius goes in at the bench, not on site. 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. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. An agent forwarding a drawing is not approving it.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. A hundred and forty years of alterations sit under the current kitchen, and the worktop is what has to sit flat on top of all of it. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. The offcut is planned before the main piece is cut.

Veining carries through a join where both pieces come off the same slab, which is decided at nesting. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. It is walked round rather than looked at from one side, so the direction the veining runs along it cannot be hidden against a wall the way it can on a perimeter run. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. The saw follows the nest, not the floor plan.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. 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. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. The cut list answers to the way in first.

A groove set needs a clear stretch of worktop beside the bowl, so it competes with the run for length instead of being free surface. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Ceilings are generous and the rooms are narrow, so the runs are long, the aisle is tight and there is nowhere to stand a slab on edge. Pieces are cut, mitred, machined and dry-assembled on the bench before anything is loaded onto a van. Two slabs get sequenced when one will not cover the run.