Worktop fabrication in Ladbroke Grove

Yes. Ladbroke Grove is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W10, W11. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. The van is not staying on a main road for the day, so once the stone is off it goes and parks properly somewhere else. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load sheet carries the parking note with it. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The original stair has an open well running the full height of the building, which occasionally lets a long piece go up vertically where it would never take the turns. 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. Every join over a gable, clear of every cut-out. 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. Radius first, polish second, joins nowhere near.

Counting hands matters more than counting metres on a staircase, because a piece two people lift off a van still wants three on the flight and a fourth watching the trailing corner. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Crates are sized to clear the same openings the stone does. A red route means no stopping, and no stopping means exactly that, so the stone comes in from a side street or from a bay behind the property. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Straps and battens are chosen for lifting, not just for transit.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. 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. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Reorderable later, or not specified. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Six kitchens, one slab run, one colour.

The return piece is the awkward one on a slab: short, full depth, and rarely nesting neatly against the long lengths, so yield rather than area is what moves the material figure. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. A waterfall leg is cut in sequence off its own top. The material band is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

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. A notch and a cut-out never share the same span. 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. Whoever holds the budget sees the drawing first.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. An L can be mitred at the corner for a continuous look or butt-jointed over the gable, and the two are different money and different risk. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Cut-outs are machined with the piece bedded down.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. Day to day all three want soap and water; abrasive creams and scouring pads are what dull a polished surface. Winders at the head of each flight are the tightest part of the climb and they are appreciably tighter than the straight run below them. 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. Nested to the route first and the slab second.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. Suspended timber floors flex underfoot, and anything that moves beneath a unit shows up later as a lipped join. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Two slabs get sequenced when one will not cover the run.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Load order is set by the order the pieces will be carried.