Worktop fabrication in Wandsworth Common

Yes. Wandsworth Common is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW18, SW11, SW12. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Loading concessions differ from one zone to the next rather than following a single national rule, so what applied on the last job proves nothing about this one. 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. You never have to visit anything or collect anything: we template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen.

Original panelling and shutter boxes stand out from the structural wall, so the face the units meet is joinery rather than plaster. 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. Two walls each a degree out give an internal corner two degrees out, and the whole of that error lands in the mitre. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. Radius first, polish second, joins nowhere near.

Suction lifters earn their keep on a straight flight and become a liability on a winder, where a handle standing out from the face is one more thing to catch on a wall. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Handling points are marked on the crate before it is strapped. A van waiting on a loading concession has somebody standing with it, because a vehicle left unattended is the one that collects the ticket. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. The load sheet carries the parking note with it.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed. An annexe kitchen is often built to keep a parent independent, so worktop height and reach matter as much as the material does. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Repeat runs come off a jig, not a fresh setout. A family adding a self-contained unit is paying for the whole conversion, and the worktop is one line in a much longer job. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. One setout, eight identical tops.

A pop-up socket in the surface is one more cut-out through the full thickness, and it wants the same clear space beneath it that a sink does. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Join count follows the shape, not the metreage. Material alone is £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are never folded into that figure.

A scribe has a working limit, and past twenty millimetres or so the back edge starts eating depth the run cannot spare. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. 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. Flats bought out of managed stock keep the original kitchen dimensions long after the ownership changed, so the layout says very little about who is paying for the work. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. One batch wherever the specification repeats.

If you want the old top kept for a garage or a utility, say so and it stays on site. The template can be taken with the old top still down, which is why one visit covers both. An old stone top is heavier coming out than the new one is going in, and leaves in sections. 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. Where the carry is long the pieces are strapped for handling rather than for the shortest route off the tail lift. Straps and battens are chosen for lifting, not just for transit.

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. The design and quotation visit is free and carries no obligation, so a figure exists before any commitment. Walls that bow along their length are the normal condition rather than the exception, and a straight-cut back edge will show a shadow gap at one end and touch at the other. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The casing gets plotted. The steel inside it does not.

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. On a book-matched pair the halves are laid out so the mirror line runs down the length of the piece, and once that line is set the top cannot be turned round to suit anything else. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Drawn onto the slab before it is cut.

It is quoted by area like the worktop, so a long run is a material line rather than a trim. Tiling and stone can meet, but where they meet is decided before the template rather than after. What decides between them is usually the wall: what it is built of, how flat it is, and where the sockets ended up. 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 other constraint is the hall: a piece has to come through the front door, round the newel at the foot of the stairs and through a doorway into the back kitchen, so we size the pieces to the tightest turn on that route before we nest anything, which sometimes means splitting a run that would otherwise have gone in whole. Lath and plaster is cut for, never cut into.