Worktop fabrication in Lower Morden

Yes. Lower Morden is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SM4. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. 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. The frame is filled back to front when the bay is booked short. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

The rear wall now carries french or folding doors across most of its width, so a whole side of the room opens and a long piece comes straight in off the garden. Most of these have a side passage and a back door, so a full-length piece can usually reach the kitchen without being cut down, and the piece sizing is driven by the slab rather than the route. Cut-outs are placed where the fabric will take them. Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The casing gets plotted. The steel inside it does not.

A step up off the pavement means the piece is lifted to the threshold before it is carried anywhere, and that first lift is the one that wants four hands. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A piece too long for the stairs is a piece cut twice. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Handling counts are decided here, not on the pavement.

It is inside the three we do most here, under worktop installation. Either way: same template, same workshop, same fitters. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. The batch stays together to the crate. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Reorderable later, or not specified.

The two returns in a U are close to the same size and it is tempting to nest them side by side, except that the veining then mirrors across the room and reads as deliberate for the wrong reason. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The overhang is cut with its support already sized. Supply only, material is £110 to £550 per square metre, with templating, fabrication and fitting quoted on their own lines.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The piece is nested around the scribe, not despite it. The peninsula end detail needs deciding up front - square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall - because a waterfall end has to be cut in sequence off the same part of the slab as the top. A quartz sample left on the counter for a week under the actual kitchen lights settles more arguments than any showroom, and an owner is the only person in a position to do that. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Cut once, to the sheet that came back signed.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. The units stay where they are and only the surface changes. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. Where the carry is long the pieces are strapped for handling rather than for the shortest route off the tail lift. Two trips off the van means two chances to catch a corner.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. Three runs is three scribes and three separate lifts, so a U takes longer on site than its metreage suggests even on a day when nothing goes wrong. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Edge work on a return matches edge work on a length.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. No money changes hands before the template. These were built with a coal store and an outside lavatory off the back, and where those got absorbed into the kitchen the walls around them are thinner and later. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. The slab is laid out around the awkward piece.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. The extension slab was poured to its own level, so there is a lip or a ramp where the new floor meets the original one. Pieces are cut, mitred, machined and dry-assembled on the bench before anything is loaded onto a van. Machined in the shop, where it belongs.