Worktop fabrication in Maze Hill

Yes. Maze Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE10, SE3. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. 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. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Where the kitchen has taken the bay, the end of the room is three facets of glass set at angles and there is no straight wall left to finish against. 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. The saw follows the template, never the plan. The stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The notch is machined, never ground in later.

A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Load order is set by the order the pieces will be carried. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. 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.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. In a converted house the flat entrance and the internal doorway are usually tighter than the communal stairs, and that is easy to overlook. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Matched means the same block, not the same name. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Plot two has to match plot nine.

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. The overhang is cut with its support already sized. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A room can be out of square in both directions at once, so the wall that leans is also the wall that runs downhill, and one scribe cannot answer both. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. A plan-angle mitre closes on paper only. 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. Two flats with an identical layout can want entirely different things from the same run of worktop, which is why the quote follows the run rather than the address. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. A provider specification is cut exactly as written.

The template produces a drawing, and the workshop cuts to that drawing once you agree it. No payment is due before the template. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Chimney breasts are often taken out at ground level and left standing above, so the middle of the run is newer wall than the two ends of it. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Book-matching is decided at the slab, not at the saw.

Grooves are machined in the workshop at the same time as the bowl cut-out, because they cannot be done well in a kitchen. They are cut with a fall towards the bowl, which is why they cannot be added on site later. An under-stairs cupboard eats one end of most of these kitchens, and the run stops at a door that has to keep opening. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. Undermount cut-outs are polished before anything leaves.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. The carry route is measured before anything is cut, so a piece that will not make the turn is split at the drawing stage rather than discovered on the day. Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. A lift diagonal is a workshop dimension as much as a site one.

What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. An upstand is a slim strip that follows the worktop up the wall; a full-height splashback runs from the worktop to the underside of the wall units. Cornice runs round the head of the wall, so the wall units stop under it and the splashback band is trapped between two things that are not going to move. Pieces are sized to the tightest turn on the route before anything is nested to the slab. What leaves the bench is what fits the room.