Worktop fabrication in Tufnell Park

Yes. Tufnell Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N7, NW5. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where the nearest legal space is a couple of streets back, the walk with each piece becomes the job, and the crew is sized for walking rather than wheeling. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Packing takes its cue from the distance to the door. Nothing needs visiting and nothing needs collecting: the template is in your kitchen and so is the fit.

A basement is often reached by its own door under the front steps, and that door is smaller than anything else on the route. 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. What the wall does is on the drawing before the saw runs. A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the template plots the intermediate points. 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.

A window sill or a radiator on the half-landing takes the corner out of the turn at precisely the point the piece needs that corner. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. A piece too long for the stairs is a piece cut twice. Applying for a suspension means naming a length of kerb and a date, and moving the date generally means applying for it again. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. What comes off first is settled before the doors shut.

Not to any real extent, and it would be easy to imply it was. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop installation. It describes the kitchens on this patch, not the work that goes into them. Same quoting, same cutting, same fitting as anywhere else on the patch. 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. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Short runs waste more slab than long ones do. A kitchen carved out of a larger room sits under whatever the original plan left behind, so the run frequently ends at a blocked doorway or a boxed-in service. 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.

Whether it comes off the same slab as the run behind it or needs one of its own is settled by laying both against the usable area of the slab, not by adding the metres up. 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 is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a corner is a couple of degrees off, a mitre cut to a theoretical ninety degrees opens on the wall side and there is no closing it afterwards. 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. 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. One staircase can serve an owner on the first floor and a managed tenancy on the second, so the access arrangement changes at every landing while the building stays the same. Changing an appliance after the nest is set means recutting the piece, not adjusting it. Cut once, to the sheet that came back signed.

A template on a normal kitchen takes two to three hours in the room. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. Templating and fitting are two visits, not one, and the gap between them is when the stone is actually cut. Gas, waste and later wiring were boxed in against the wall long after the house was built, and that boxing is what the run has to clear. 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.

Slabs come in finite sizes, so a long run needs a join whatever the room looks like. A finished join is typically two to three millimetres, colour-matched and sanded flush. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. The offcut taken out of the middle for a hob is a large usable piece, and it is worth deciding early whether it becomes an upstand or goes in the skip. 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.

A join added to get stone into the room is a different thing from a join added because the slab ran out, and the quote says which is which. The alternative to a join is a shorter run, which is usually the wrong thing to trade away. Carrying down a flight is not the easier direction, because the weight runs ahead of the crew and whoever is at the bottom has no way of stopping a slip. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. Handling points are marked on the crate before it is strapped.

How much slab you hold matters: upstands and any remake have to come out of the same batch. The quote is itemised, so a job where you already hold the slab is the same job with the material line taken off it. Conversions put kitchens where the services could be made to reach rather than where they belong, so runs are short and interrupted. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Small kitchens are more bench work per square metre.