Worktop fabrication in St Quintin Park

Yes. St Quintin Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W10. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Kensington and Chelsea. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The load plan follows from it. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

The original scullery gully is still live in the yard outside the back door, and new waste from the sink joins a drain laid for a copper and a stone sink. 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. Walls out of plumb are cut for at the bench. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Cut to the plotted line, not the nominal one.

Grass and gravel will not take a loaded trolley, so a boarded track gets laid from the gate to the door before the first piece moves. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. A lift diagonal is a workshop dimension as much as a site one. 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. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. Extension kitchens are usually specified long before they are buildable, so the run lengths on the drawing and the run lengths in the room are different numbers. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Yield is what makes batching worth doing at all. 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. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do.

Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. A recut loses the sequence for good. Material sits between £110 and £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted line by line.

A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The mitre is cut to the angle we found, not to ninety. 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. The approved drawing is the instruction.

If a piece cannot be got in at all, we say so at the template rather than on the day. A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. A step up to a patio or a raised threshold at the back door means the piece is lifted rather than rolled, and that is where the crew size gets decided. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. Thinner material is specified where the carry demands it.

The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. A cast iron soil stack runs down the outside of the rear wall, so moving the sink means a fresh penetration through solid brick. The workshop works to the template drawing and to the measured route, in that order. Joins over gables, always.

What comes out goes by the same route the new stone comes in by, which is why that route is walked before anything is lifted. If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The units are untouched. Only the top of them changes. 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. That is the last thing settled before dispatch.

The joint between splashback and worktop is siliconed, never grouted, so it can move a little without cracking. Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. Ordered later from a different batch, the match is not reliable where the two pieces meet. The rear door swings inward across the end of the run, so the last few hundred millimetres of worktop are only reachable with the door shut. Pieces are sized to the tightest turn on the route before anything is nested to the slab. Thin partitions get shallower overhangs, decided in the shop.