Worktop fabrication in Lee

Yes. Lee is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE12. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Where a loading concession applies at all, it holds only while something is being carried, which makes it a way to unload rather than a way to park. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The van is packed to suit the walk at the other end. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

A soil stack is strapped to the outside of the addition wall and its branch comes through low, which settles where the sink can go before any layout is drawn. 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. Older houses come off the bench with longer scribes. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. A notch and a cut-out never share the same span.

A side gate hung to open outward against a fence post is narrower in use than it measures, and lifting the gate off its hinges is usually the quickest win on the route. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The saw never sees a length the hall will not take. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. A timed unload is planned into the rack before it leaves.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. One drawing set, every unit. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. The batch stays together to the crate.

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. Book-matched pieces are cut adjacent or not at all. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The casing gets plotted. The steel inside it does not. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. 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.

A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. 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. A recut loses the sequence for good.

Templating, fabrication and fitting are the same three lines whether the stone came from us or from you. Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Reorderable later, or not specified.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. Pieces are sized to the tightest turn on the route before anything is nested to the slab. The fall across the floor is in the cut list.

Socket and switch positions have to be final before templating, because the openings are machined rather than chopped out on the wall. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. Joins land over a cabinet gable and clear of every cut-out, because the alternative is a bridge of stone that will not survive the carry. What the wall does is on the drawing before the saw runs.