Worktop fabrication in Telegraph Hill

Yes. Telegraph Hill is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Lewisham. 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. 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. There is nothing to drive to and nothing to pick up, because both visits are to the property itself.

Ceilings are high enough that an extractor over the island has a long drop, and its position is fixed before the island top is templated. 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. The fall across the floor is in the cut list. 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. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Upstands leave the bench in lengths, not as one run.

The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The cut list answers to the way in first. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. 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 replacement. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Yield is what makes batching worth doing at all. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do.

Both runs are in view at the same time, so the two pieces are taken off the same area of slab and the veining is set to run the same way on each side. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Mitres are cut as pairs, off one setting. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

Legs bottoming out on hard concrete or an uneven screed mean the tops of the carcasses are not one plane, and that is picked up at template rather than on fitting day. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. Radius first, polish second, joins nowhere near. 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. The householder is normally on site at template, and that is the right time to settle sink position, tap centres and overhang rather than agree them by email. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Whoever holds the budget sees the drawing first.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Units have to be fitted, fixed and level before templating, and it is better to hear that at the template than on the fitting day. The check comes before the measuring rather than after, because the whole drawing is set out from that plane. Level has to hold across the whole room rather than along one wall, or a floor that falls end to end shows as a step where two pieces meet. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. A notch and a cut-out never share the same span.

If the units run late the template moves, not the fit: the gap between them is fabrication. The fitting itself is one visit: a plain run is a morning, an island with splashbacks takes most of the day. Nothing is payable in advance of the template. Solid walls hold their heat and their damp, and anything sealed against them is worth looking at again a season later. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. The awkward corner is cut first, while the slab is whole.

Nothing is payable until the template, and the template measures the room as it stands rather than estimating from a plan. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. A floor that falls across the depth of a run rather than along it tips the carcasses front to back, and packing the front feet changes the overhang while it fixes the level. 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. The casing gets plotted. The steel inside it does not.

The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. Nothing is cut out in the kitchen. Cutting a bowl on site is how worktops get cracked. A galley closed at one end takes a short return across the top, and that little piece carries the same edge work, the same handling and nearly the same cost as a full length. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. The corner is proven on the bench first.