Worktop fabrication in Liverpool Street

Yes. Liverpool Street is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC2M. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. 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. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The kitchen was a service room at the back of the flat, so it is a long way from the front door along a corridor with two turns in it. The lift, if there is one, is a small passenger car with a gate, and the alternative is a stone stair winding round the shaft with a tight turn at every half-landing - so pieces get cut deliberately shorter than the slab allows and the kitchen is designed with more joins than it strictly needs. The shell decides the piece; the slab decides only the yield. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through 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 fitted stair carpet is either lifted or covered, because grit trodden into it under work boots does more harm than the carry itself. 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. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. A booked slot dictates the order the frame is filled in.

Honestly, no, though it would be easy to claim otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. That says something about the housing round here, not about the work. Quote, cut and fit are the same here as on any other part of the patch. A converted flat is measured off the original house, so no two units in the same building have quite the same kitchen run. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Six kitchens, one slab run, one colour. 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. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. A batch split across two weeks stops being a batch.

A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Short pieces cost bench time, not slab area. Expect £110 to £550 per square metre for material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting on their own lines.

Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. 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. Access arrangements and the porter's permitted hours need confirming before we cut, because the agreed piece size is what the nesting is built around. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. 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.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. 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 drawing decides it, not the fitter.

What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. Stone goes up on edge, and it is the half-landing turn rather than the flight itself that sets the maximum piece. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. Load order is set by the order the pieces will be carried.

We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Where the hob lands is set out against the units and the wall behind, not off the kitchen plan. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. 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 overhang is cut with its support already sized.

Tiling bonded to the wall behind usually comes away with the old top, so that wall is agreed beforehand. The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. Where the carry is long the pieces are strapped for handling rather than for the shortest route off the tail lift. The yard reads the access note before it racks anything.