Worktop fabrication in Sydenham Hill

Yes. Sydenham Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE26. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. Some drives are wide enough for the van and too short for the tail lift, because the tail lift needs its own clear metre behind the vehicle. 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 template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original joinery is deep and stands proud of the plaster, so the run is plotted to the units rather than to the wall behind them. Access is off a drive and through wide doors, so for once the piece size is not the constraint - the joins that go in are the ones we choose for layout and veining, not the ones the building forces. Walls out of plumb are cut for at the bench. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Oversize on the scribe edge, always.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The drawing carries that decision through to the saw. 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. 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.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. 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. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do. 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. 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.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Supply-only material is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately rather than rolled in.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The radius goes in at the bench, not on site. The range or Aga, the sink and the tap all need to be confirmed by model before nesting, because their clearances and hole positions set where the island can be cut. An owner living in the house makes the decisions and lives with them, so the specification tends to go towards the material rather than towards the lowest total. 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.

An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. If the island is a few hundred millimetres longer than the usable length of a slab, a second slab gets bought to gain that overhang, and the whole slab is paid for rather than the part used. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Dry-assembled to the shape of your run.

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. Two bowls means two cut-outs and a bridge of stone between them, which decides where the sink can go. On a heavily veined stone the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab so the movement relates across the room. Pieces are dry-assembled on the bench before dispatch so the corners are known to close before they leave the workshop. Join count follows the shape, not the metreage.

Old laminate is light and awkward rather than heavy, so it is usually the easier half of the day. On a replacement the old top comes off in the morning and the new stone is down and sealed the same day. 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. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. The load plan follows from it.

Supply through us runs £110 to £550 per square metre for the slab alone, which is the line you would be removing. How the slab has been stored is worth telling us, because stone kept flat is not stone off a rack. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Small kitchens are more bench work per square metre.