Worktop fabrication in St Paul's

Yes. St Paul's is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EC4M. It is worked on our City of London run, along with the rest of the Square Mile. A single red line has hours and a double red line does not, and the difference decides whether an early start is a plan or a penalty. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb. Everything that involves you happens in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Ceiling heights are held to the minimum the plan allows, so the panel between worktop and wall units is a short piece. Piece size is set by the lift car, not by the slab. The fall across the floor is in the cut list. Boxing built in plasterboard on a light frame will take no useful fixing, so nothing bears on it and the stone is carried off the carcasses either side. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. A deep relief needs material left behind it.

Bollards, planters and a one-way service road can turn what looks like a ten-metre carry into a fifty-metre one. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Handling points are marked on the crate before it is strapped. Where a marked loading box sits on the red route the stop is legal but timed, so the unload runs as one movement with every hand on it. 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.

Not really, and there is no sense dressing it up. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, worktop installation and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It gets quoted, cut and fitted exactly as it would anywhere else on the patch. Agents book this work at short notice, because the void only becomes a real date once the outgoing tenant confirms they are going. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. The annexe top comes off the main kitchen slab. A managed portfolio tends to repeat one specification across every flat, which keeps later repairs and replacements simple to order. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Small kitchens are more bench work per square metre.

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. Join count follows the shape, not the metreage. Stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and the templating, the fabrication and the fitting each carry their own line.

A stack boxed diagonally across a corner leaves a triangle of dead space, and the top is cut to that triangle rather than to a square return. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The notch is machined, never ground in later. Sink, tap and hob need to be with us before machining, along with confirmation of whether the island is getting a breakfast overhang, since anything past roughly 300mm unsupported needs steel let into the carcasses and that has to be built in, not added later. Nobody reseals a worktop annually in a let property, so a material that depends on being resealed is the wrong specification however well it photographs. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. An agent forwarding a drawing is not approving it.

Old tops are screwed or glued from underneath, so the drawer boxes come out before the worktop does. 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. A bus lane along the frontage brings its own hours with it, and stopping in one is enforced the same way the red route is. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Loaded for the carry, not for the van.

Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. Quartz and sintered stone never need sealing: quartz is non-porous and sintered stone has effectively zero porosity. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Every flat on the floor is the same plan handed left and right, so the room is predictable even where the building is not. We work to the internal depth of the car and the diagonal you can actually stand a piece up on with the doors closed, then nest to that, which routinely turns a two-piece kitchen into a three-piece one with an extra join over a gable. What the wall does is on the drawing before the saw runs.

The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. No payment is due before the template. The lift car, the loading bay and the building manager decide the piece sizes here, not the slab. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. The slab is laid out around the awkward piece.

Doorways, the newel post and the handrail usually take the room away, rather than the stairs themselves. A join forced by the route still sits over a gable, so it is no poorer a join for that. A piece travels on edge, never flat, because on edge is how stone of that length carries its own weight. The barrier, the entry code and the estate rules decide when a van can get near the door, and none of that is negotiable on the day. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The drawing carries that decision through to the saw.