Worktop fabrication in Lisson Grove

Yes. Lisson Grove is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW8, NW1. It is worked on our central London run, along with the rest of Westminster. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Whole streets went up to two or three plans, so the house next door has the same kitchen and forty years of extensions have made none of them measure the same. Walls in the system-built blocks are concrete or panel and can bow noticeably over the length of a run, so the template picks up the real line and we cut the back edge to follow it rather than trimming on site with a grinder. A scribe of twenty millimetres is machined, not fettled on site. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Nothing leaves the bench expecting a square wall.

A rated load sounds ample until three lengths of granite and two fitters are standing on it, so the stone goes up one piece at a time. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Polishing a piece that cannot reach the room wastes a day. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. A timed unload is planned into the rack before it leaves.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. The person choosing the worktop is not the person using it, and that shifts the balance from appearance towards running cost. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Matched means the same block, not the same name. Where kitchens turn over between tenancies the priority is a surface that survives a decade of being treated as a chopping board. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Plot two has to match plot nine.

A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. 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. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Radiused, polished, and clear of the joins. The stack boxing needs to be in its final form and the sink and hob on site before we machine, since a boxing that gets re-clad afterwards throws the notch out. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Slabs for a programme are pulled together, not weekly.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Ceilings sit at about two point three metres and the head of the window is close under them, so a unit over the window has very little wall to hold onto. The notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius, because a square internal corner there is where a top fails. Older houses come off the bench with longer scribes.

Hoisting through a window is occasionally the answer, and it is a decision made at the template, not improvised on the fitting day. Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. Blankets on the walls and a board on the floor go in before the first piece, because a scratched car becomes a bill from the managing agent long after the kitchen is finished. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Edge profiles are finished before the stone is ever stood on end.

Our own installers do the carry, so there is nobody in the middle to argue with about it. A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Lift doors close on a timer that takes no account of somebody holding a worktop, so a pair of hands stays on the buttons at each end. The workshop cuts to that constraint, so a piece leaves the bench already sized to reach where it is going. The cut list answers to the way in first.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. A join is glued and clamped flush on the day, so it is fixed rather than something to be undone. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. It is the heaviest single piece in the kitchen, so the number of hands needed on the day and the route in are worked out from that piece rather than from the runs. 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.