Worktop fabrication in Peckham Rye

Yes. Peckham Rye is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE15, SE22. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Estate roads inside a controlled zone are sometimes managed privately rather than by the council, which changes who has to be asked. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The crate spec follows the length of the carry. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Internal walls are lath and plaster on studs with heavy framing behind, so a fixing finds either nothing at all or something very solid. 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. Lath and plaster is cut for, never cut into. Where two pieces meet over a fall in the floor the join has to be flush to the hand as well as true to the level, because the eye reads the join and forgives the room. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. A plan-angle mitre closes on paper only.

A pendant light hanging in the middle of a hall ceiling sets the angle a piece can be tilted to, and it is the measurement nobody thinks to take. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. It is settled on the bench, not on site. A controlled parking zone means either a visitor permit sorted in advance or a suspended bay, and a suspension is applied for days ahead rather than on the morning. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. We pack for the tail lift we are actually going to use.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. 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. Every flat cut off one drawing, errors included. 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. The spares are cut while the slab is still open.

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. The overhang is cut with its support already sized. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The measured wall angle travels to the saw. 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. 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. Nothing is cut before the signature comes back.

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. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Yield drops the moment the back edge stops being straight.

Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. What moves the figure after templating is a change you make: a different edge, an extra cut-out, a bigger sink chosen late. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. Left and right alcove pieces are marked and stay marked.

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. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. A full-height piece shows a wall that is out more than an upstand does, over the extra height. Floors are boards over joists with a solid floor only in the service rooms, and the two meet somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. Islands here regularly run longer than a slab, so the join is nested to sit over an internal gable and positioned so it does not run through the hob cut-out, and on a heavily veined stone we nest the island and the back run together so the movement relates across the room. The piece is made for the room the builders left.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. 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. 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. Edge work on a return matches edge work on a length.