Worktop fabrication in Mill Hill

Yes. Mill Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW7. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Deep gravel takes the wheels of a loaded trolley and holds them, so either boards go down or the pieces are carried. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Handling counts are decided here, not on the pavement. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

These have been added to over two centuries, so the kitchen is made of two or three walls of different ages and different thicknesses. Access is off a drive and through wide doors, so for once the piece size is not the constraint - the joins that go in are the ones we choose for layout and veining, not the ones the building forces. The shell decides the piece; the slab decides only the yield. A chimney breast left in place splits a wall into two alcoves, and the two are rarely the same width and rarely parallel to each other. 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.

The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. 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. Block paving bedded on sand can rut under a fully loaded van, and that is said to the customer beforehand rather than explained afterwards. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Two trips off the van means two chances to catch a corner.

Yes, one of the three we see most, with worktop installation ahead of it. Same visit to template, same workshop, same installers on the day. 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. Reorderable later, or not specified. 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. Six kitchens, one slab run, one colour.

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. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. A recut loses the sequence for good. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Alcove pieces get cut oversize on both scribe edges, with the true wall angles carried on the template drawing rather than assumed. 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 range or Aga, the sink and the tap all need to be confirmed by model before nesting, because their clearances and hole positions set where the island can be cut. An owner paying for this directly tends to want the reasoning as much as the number, so a quote that explains why a join sits where it does is worth more than a cheaper one that does not. 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.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. Deep skirtings, a dado and a picture rail survive in the original rooms, so nothing sits flat to the wall without being cut around first. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Joins over gables, always.

If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. Between the template and the fit the slab is nested, cut, mitred and dry-assembled on the bench, which is work you never see and is most of the wait. The room has three or four doors and a route through it to the garden, so the work shares the space with everyone else in the house. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. Cut to the room, not to a rectangle.

Each join is an item on the drawing, so the layout and the figure move together. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A mitred join at a corner is a different job from a butt join along a run, and they are not priced the same. Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Every piece is labelled to its place in the run.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. Taking the old tops away is a line rather than an assumption, so it comes off if you do not want it. 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 workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. Nothing leaves the bench expecting a square wall.