Worktop fabrication in Tooting Bec

Yes. Tooting Bec is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW17. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. Packing takes its cue from the distance to the door. The template happens in your kitchen and so does the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Internal walls are lath on timber studs while the flank walls are brick, so two walls in the same kitchen take a fixing completely differently. Pieces are sized to the tightest turn on the route before anything is nested to the slab. Settled on the drawing, cut once. Plaster thickness varies over the height of a wall, so the line at worktop height is not the line at skirting level, and the units decide which one matters. 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.

Carrying through the house means protecting the whole route first: floor boarded, banister padded, and the front door held open on a wedge rather than by hand. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The saw never sees a length the hall will not take. Controlled hours that end in the middle of the afternoon make the second half of the day easy and put the whole problem in the first half. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. What comes off first is settled before the doors shut.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. The annexe top comes off the main kitchen slab. 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. Small kitchens are more bench work per square metre.

A hob cut-out and the floor penetration feeding it have to land over the same cabinet, and where they do not it is the stone that gets redrawn rather than the pipework. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Dry-assembled to the shape of your run. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Radius first, polish second, joins nowhere near. 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. Cut once, to the sheet that came back signed.

A join cannot cross a cut-out, so a sink mid-run takes away the position you would have used. A join sits over a cabinet gable. It never spans a gap and never runs through a cut-out. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. Sockets set into the end panel keep the top clear, but they sit below the stone and are cut into the panel by the fitter rather than machined into the worktop. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Join count follows the shape, not the metreage.

On a porous stone the grooved area is sealed with the rest, and it gets wet more than anything else. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The original front door is narrow and the hall is often the only way in, which puts a ceiling on the longest single piece. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. The slab is laid out around the awkward piece.

Floors and units are protected before anything comes through the door. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A remake goes back through the same cutting and polishing, so it is a return visit rather than a patch. A hall radiator or a coat hook at shoulder height takes a hundred millimetres off the usable width, and a hundred millimetres is often the entire margin. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Machining happens after the carry length is fixed, not before.

No installed price per square metre is published, because it is not a real number. The edge profile is its own line, so a shaped edge and a square one are two different figures. Plumbing, gas and electrical work are not in the figure, because we do not do them. A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. A notch and a cut-out never share the same span.