Worktop fabrication in Richmond Hill

Yes. Richmond Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are TW10. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Richmond upon Thames. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Straps and battens are chosen for lifting, not just for transit. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. 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. What leaves the bench is what fits the room. Two alcove pieces will not swap over however similar they look, so they are marked left and right at the bench and stay that way to the van. 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 drawing decides it, not the fitter.

There is no leaning a piece against a wall halfway up, so any flight longer than a dozen treads is planned around a rest point on a landing. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The drawing states a maximum length and the shop honours it. A drive that shelves towards the house needs the van chocked and the trolley controlled, since a loaded A-frame gathers speed quickly on a slope. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. A booked slot dictates the order the frame is filled in.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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. Every flat cut off one drawing, errors included. 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. The spares are cut while the slab is still open.

The walkway between the two runs is fixed by the units either side, so any overhang added to one worktop comes straight off the space somebody has to stand in. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Machined to the real line. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Cutouts are checked against the actual appliances, whoever bought them.

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. Splitting a run costs a join, and that is the price of getting stone into the room at all. Pendant fittings over the stairwell and anything hung on the half-landing come down first, because a piece on edge sweeps a wider arc than the people carrying it. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. Polishing a piece that cannot reach the room wastes a day.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. 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 bow in an old wall is cut for, not sanded out.

If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. Nothing is payable in advance of the template. Where the walls have been dry-lined over the old lath there is a void behind the board and no solid fixing until a batten is found. 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.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. 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. Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Dry-assembled to the shape of your run.