Worktop fabrication in Sloane Square

Yes. Sloane Square is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW1W, SW3. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. Underground loading has a height restriction, and a van with an A-frame on it is taller than the driver remembers. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. What comes off first is settled before the doors shut. Your part of it happens entirely at home, with nothing to travel to and nothing to bring back.

Many were built with a solid sub-floor to the rear rooms, so the kitchen floor is concrete and level while the front of the house is suspended timber. 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. The template carries the building into the workshop. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. A relief that deep changes how the piece is lifted.

Concierge buildings want the goods entrance, a booked lift and proof of insurance, all of which is straightforward when it is asked for a week out. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The cut list answers to the way in first. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The load sheet carries the parking note with it.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands. 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. Quartz suits let property well: no sealing, no annual maintenance, and nothing an incoming tenant has to be told to look after. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Yield is what makes batching worth doing at all. A worktop replacement between tenancies is a single-day job by design, because the flat is not earning while it is empty. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do.

A full-depth tall unit projects past the worktop line, and the run has to be scribed against its side panel instead of carrying on past it. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Dry-assembled to the shape of your run. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Cut to the plotted line, not the nominal one. 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. Work between tenancies runs against a fixed date rather than a preference, and stone has a lead time that has to fit inside that window with a few days spare. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. The signature on the drawing carries the cost of it.

A long top on units that were shimmed once and never checked is the commonest version of this, and it is cheap to fix beforehand. Level is checked at the template, which is the point of measuring in the room rather than off a drawing. Levelling belongs in the carcasses, on their own legs and packers. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. 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 mitre is cut to the angle we found, not to ninety.

The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Take the old tops off yourself if you would rather, and the quote simply carries one line fewer. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. The goods lift has its own booking sheet, and a bay slot without a lift slot only gets the stone as far as the lobby. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Straps and battens are chosen for lifting, not just for transit.

A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. Where the sink and the hob face each other across the aisle, everything carried between them crosses the walkway, and that is the one movement the shape cannot design out. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Join count follows the shape, not the metreage.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. 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. Edwardian terraces are wider and taller than the Victorian houses next to them, so the kitchen usually takes a full-width rear room rather than a narrow outrigger. 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. A century of movement is taken out at the bench.