Worktop fabrication in Streatham Vale

Yes. Streatham Vale is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW16. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Lambeth. Gravel and block paving both look like hard standing and neither takes a loaded trolley, so the run from tail lift to door gets boarded. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. One movement off the van starts with how it went on. The work comes to you. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, with nothing to visit or collect.

The original kitchen was a working room with a scullery and a pantry off it, so what is now one space was two or three with brick walls between them. Most of these have a side passage and a back door, so a full-length piece can usually reach the kitchen without being cut down, and the piece sizing is driven by the slab rather than the route. The bow in an old wall is cut for, not sanded out. 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. 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 notch is machined, never ground in later.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Thinner material is specified where the carry demands it. A shared drive is only useful if the neighbour is not the one parked behind the van, so we ask which side the standing belongs to before the date is set. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Kerbside unloading is planned in the racking, not improvised at the door.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation and worktop replacement. 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. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do. 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. The annexe top comes off the main kitchen slab.

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. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Every piece is labelled to its place in the run. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

Where the boxing stands proud of the finished wall the upstand behind it has to be broken into separate lengths, because one piece cannot pass it. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. A plan-angle mitre closes on paper only. The peninsula end detail needs deciding up front - square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall - because a waterfall end has to be cut in sequence off the same part of the slab as the top. Someone who expects to still be there in ten years asks different questions: how a honed finish marks, what a sealer does and does not do, and whether a chip by the sink can be repaired in place. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Remakes for our error are ours to carry.

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. Stone does not flex, so a run that rocks on its carcasses rocks just as badly once it is stone. A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. A boxed soil stack or service riser in the corner of a run eats into the worktop depth and has to be scribed around rather than cut square. 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 measured wall angle travels to the saw.

Every run, cut-out, edge, join and groove set is a line, which is what makes it comparable with anyone else’s. Cut-outs, edge profile and join count are itemised, so taking one out removes a line rather than starting an argument. Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. It also decides where in the slab the piece is taken from, because a deep relief needs material behind it that a straight edge never asks for. Yield drops the moment the back edge stops being straight.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. Corner sinks and corner hobs sit exactly where the joint wants to be, so on an L the cut-out positions get settled before the join positions do. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Short pieces cost bench time, not slab area.

Both are templated after the worktop is down and settled, because they are cut to the wall itself. A full-height piece behind the hob has to allow for the extractor, so that gets settled first. Stone up a wall is heavier than tile and bonded rather than hung, so the wall has to be sound. Where the knock-through has taken in a rear bay, the far end of the room is three faces of window with no usable wall left at all. Where a full length can come down the side and in at the back, the nest follows the slab instead of the building. A scribe of twenty millimetres is machined, not fettled on site.