Worktop fabrication in Roxbourne

Yes. Roxbourne is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are HA2. It is run from the Watford side, covering Hertfordshire & North London. 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. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. That is the last thing settled before dispatch. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

An ex-council house is solidly built to a standard plan, with the kitchen at the rear and a back door next to it. The notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius, because a square internal corner there is where a top fails. Settled on the drawing, cut once. Uniform stock means a template from one house nearly fits the next, but never assume it, because 1930s builders varied the back-door corner by an inch or two.

Uniform estate roads with drives on many houses and consistent side gate widths, which makes access predictable; maisonette blocks need a shared external stair and a two-person lift up. The side passage is the measurement that matters, because a piece has to be carried flat down it and then turned in at the back door, and the turn is always tighter than the passage. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The drawing carries that decision through to the saw. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop templating and worktop installation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Same slab run, or it is not a match. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Same slab run, or it is not a match.

Two runs meeting at an internal corner is the most common shape we fit, and the corner is where the decisions are. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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 stack boxing needs to be in its final form and the sink and hob on site before we machine, since a boxing that gets re-clad afterwards throws the notch out. These kitchens tend to be compact and reasonably square, so the fixed template, fabrication and fitting lines are a larger share of the total than the stone is. Sink and hob are dry-fitted on the bench before dispatch, whoever supplied them. Changes cost a piece, not a tweak.