Worktop fabrication in Strand-on-the-Green

Yes. Strand-on-the-Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W4. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hounslow. Where the drive falls away from the house the trolley wants to run, and where it climbs the same load has to be pushed the whole way up. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. The yard reads the access note before it racks anything. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Cottage terraces have no hall to speak of and the front door opens almost straight into the room, which makes the carry easier and the protection harder. 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. Older houses come off the bench with longer scribes. Casement handles and stays swing down into the space above the worktop, so the clearance that counts is the one measured with the window open. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Machined to the real line.

A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. One movement off the van starts with how it went on.

Often enough. It is one of the three, behind worktop installation. The template, the workshop and the installers are the same either way. Extension budgets are usually well spent by the time the worktop is ordered, which is where the choice between quartz and a thinner sintered stone actually gets made. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Yield is what makes batching worth doing at all. 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. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do.

The two runs are rarely the same length, and the shorter one often carries the sink, which puts the cut-outs in the piece with the least material to spare. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Drawn onto the slab before it is cut. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

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. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Cut oversize on purpose, every time. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Dry-assembled before it leaves.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. 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. 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.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. A tall bank of housings at one end takes a chunk out of the working run, so the usable length of that side is always less than the length of the wall behind it. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Mitres are cut as pairs, off one setting.

The sink and hob are lifted out with the old top and kept aside if you are reusing them. Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. Where the front garden has been paved over completely the van stands close to the house, and the route in is still a standard front door. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. Kerbside unloading is planned in the racking, not improvised at the door.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Each cut-out is priced on its own line, so a range, a bowl and a half, a boiling tap and a drainer are four items rather than one. 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. Every piece is drawn onto the slab before anything is cut, so the veining and the join positions are decided together rather than one after the other. The corner is proven on the bench first.