Worktop fabrication in Shortlands

Yes. Shortlands is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are BR2. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bromley. Unrestricted kerbside is straightforward as long as the space in front of the property is actually clear when the van arrives. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The yard reads the access note before it racks anything. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The bathroom upstairs sits directly over the kitchen, so its waste comes down in a boxed corner from floor to ceiling that no worktop is going to move. 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. Nothing is machined square because a plan says square. A low sill over the sink run is what decides between an upstand and stone dying into a window board, and there is often less clearance than an upstand is tall. 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.

A front path with a gate and a turn or two adds handling before the door is even reached, and every handling movement is another chance to catch a corner. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The maximum piece is written on the drawing in millimetres. On a street with no restrictions the constraint is other residents rather than a warden, so it is worth putting a cone or a car out early. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. One movement off the van starts with how it went on.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. Repeat runs come off a jig, not a fresh setout. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. One setout, eight identical tops.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Offcut sizes are decided before the first cut. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Window boards and cills stand proud of the plaster, so the back edge of the top has to be plotted to where the units actually sit rather than to the wall. 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. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. Changing an appliance after the nest is set means recutting the piece, not adjusting it. Recut time comes out of the access window.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Cut oversize on purpose, every time.

The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Every piece is dry-assembled on the bench before it is loaded, so a fabrication mistake is found in the workshop rather than in your kitchen. Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. A carpeted hall runs a trolley badly, so a heavy piece is carried rather than rolled from the threshold in. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Nesting follows the route, not the other way round.

Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Sealing is the one maintenance job that genuinely differs by material, and it is worth knowing which you are buying before the slab is chosen. A seal is not waterproofing. It only buys time to wipe a spill up. Many of these had a bathroom or a WC built onto the far end of the addition, so the room now ends at a stud wall rather than at the original brickwork. 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 shell decides the piece; the slab decides only the yield.

Two kitchens the same length can be far apart, because material, edge and cut-outs move independently of size. What is quoted is what the drawing says, and the figure does not move unless the drawing does. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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 relief comes out of the slab, not the fitter.