Worktop fabrication in Primrose Hill

Yes. Primrose Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW1, NW3. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. One movement off the van starts with how it went on. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Walls are thick, lime-plastered and built in a soft brick, so they take a scribe well and take a fixing badly. The other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. The saw follows the template, never the plan. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the 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. Yield drops the moment the back edge stops being straight.

Where the turn inside is tight the piece gets turned on the path and brought in already on edge, which needs room in front of the door as well as behind it. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it. Loading exemptions on red routes are narrow, time-limited and heavily camera-enforced, so we plan around them rather than relying on them. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Kerbside unloading is planned in the racking, not improvised at the door.

Not really, and claiming otherwise would cost nothing and mean nothing. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation. It reflects the local housing rather than any difference in the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted here the same way it is anywhere else on the patch. 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. The spares are cut while the slab is still open. 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. One kept offcut saves a whole flat later.

Two runs of similar length nest as a pair off one slab, and if one of them grows by a few hundred millimetres the pair stops fitting and the yield changes for both. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Undersides are polished where the piece is seen from below. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Left and right alcove pieces are marked and stay marked. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. A verbal change is not an instruction.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. No money changes hands before the template. On the fitting day floors and door frames are protected, joins clamped flush, sink and hob sealed. The back addition is frequently a single skin of brick rendered on both faces, which takes a fixing badly and moves with the weather. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. A piece that needs trimming later was drawn wrong.

Small variation is taken up by packing under the top on the fitting day. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. A relief that deep changes how the piece is lifted.

Where there is a lift, whether it can be booked out and padded matters as much as its size. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. The maximum piece is written on the drawing in millimetres.

A sit-on sink and an undermounted one are different cut-outs, so which it is gets settled before the template. A piece with a bowl and a hob cut into it is the fragile one, and it is handled accordingly. The sink, tap and hob have to be physically in the room at the template, not merely ordered, because the cut-out is machined to the item itself. Where the aisle is too tight the usual answer is a reduced-depth top on one side, and a 500mm run is a different cut, a different sink and a different drainer to a 600mm one. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw.