Worktop fabrication in Nine Elms

Yes. Nine Elms is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW8, SW11. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. 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. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Services run on the surface in these buildings, so conduit and pipework cross the wall behind the units and stand proud of it. The kitchen is open plan and the island is often long enough to need a join, and it sits in the middle of the room where every edge is visible, so the join goes over a gable and usually under the hob line where the eye does not follow it. Where the floor drops away the front edge is cut to suit. Encased steel is always bigger than the steel inside it, so the casing is what gets plotted, and a casing is rarely square to the wall it sits against. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Radius first, polish second, joins nowhere near.

Where only one car serves the building a breakdown on the morning halts the job outright, so the fallback route is worked out at template rather than on the landing. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The cut list answers to the way in first. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Two trips off the van means two chances to catch a corner.

Often enough. It is one of the three, behind worktop replacement. The template, the workshop and the installers are the same either way. 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. Plot two has to match plot nine. 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. Quartz reorders in five years, a granite block does not.

Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Every piece is labelled to its place in the run. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A brick pier standing into the run divides it in two, and the join goes against the pier where a clear wall would have needed no join at all. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. A notch and a cut-out never share the same span. The island layout, including whether the ends are mitred down to the floor, needs settling before cutting, since mitred ends are cut in sequence with the top and dry-assembled as one unit. Inventories record the condition of a kitchen at both ends of a tenancy, which is a practical argument for a surface that looks the same in its fifth year as its first. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Dry-assembled before it leaves.

A Belfast or butler sink has to be installed and at its final height before the template, because the stone is cut to sit on it. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Short pieces cost bench time, not slab area.

They read strongly across a dark stone and are nearly invisible on a pale one, so look before deciding. A groove set is its own item on the quote rather than something rolled in with the sink cut-out. Open plan means long uninterrupted runs and an island in the middle of the room with every edge on show. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Drainer grooves are machined flat, on a bed, never on site.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. Where the structure cannot be cut into, the stone is relieved instead, and a relief that deep changes both the yield off the slab and how the piece is handled. 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 casing gets plotted. The steel inside it does not.

Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Sinks, taps and hobs are yours to buy in any case, and they only have to be in the room for the template. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Every flat cut off one drawing, errors included.