Worktop fabrication in Westcombe Park

Yes. Westcombe Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE3, SE10. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. A gate post set narrower than the opening looks generous from the road and stops a wide piece a metre in. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

The bay at the front and the back addition at the rear were built to different standards, and the kitchen is nearly always in the weaker of the two. 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. The bow in an old wall is cut for, not sanded out. 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. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. A notch and a cut-out never share the same span.

A narrow entrance hall with a turn into the back of the house caps the longest piece we can physically get in, whatever the run itself measures. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. An access join is dressed to the same standard as any other. Overhanging branches clear the roof of a car and catch the roof of a van, so the drive is looked at from the driver seat rather than from the doorstep. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. That is the last thing settled before dispatch.

Yes, one of the three we see most, with worktop installation ahead of it. Same visit to template, same workshop, same installers on the day. Extension work runs late far more often than it runs early, and the worktop is close to the last thing in, so the date agreed at the start is rarely the date that happens. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. The batch is checked against itself before it leaves. Where a family has been living around a building site for months, the finish date carries more weight than any other part of the specification. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Ten metres of upstand out of what the tops left.

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. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Drawn onto the slab before it is cut. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

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. 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. 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. Some doors in a building need a consent letter and some need nothing at all, so the first question is which arrangement applies here rather than which one is usual. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Nothing is cut before the signature comes back.

A sloping floor is not the problem. The plane the unit tops finish in is. Variation past what packing can take up has to be corrected in the carcasses before we cut, because the template records the units as they stand. Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. 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. The workshop cuts to the plotted line rather than to a nominal dimension, which is why a scribe edge leaves the bench deliberately oversize. The piece is nested around the scribe, not despite it.

Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. There are only ever a few legal positions, and the one taken is furthest from the light. A waterfall leg is a separate piece bonded to the top on a mitre, so the floor it stands on has to be level enough for that mitre to close along its full height. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Mitres are cut as pairs, off one setting.

A dropped pan years later is a different question, and stone is remade rather than filled either way. Damage found on the bench never leaves the workshop, and damage on the carry is remade under the same cover. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. The longest piece is capped in the workshop, deliberately.

Grooves and an undermounted bowl are usually specified together, since the grooves are run to the bowl edge. The alternative stands on the surface, so the choice is losing worktop permanently or only while you are draining. A picture rail, a deep skirting and a moulded architrave all sit in the way of anything that assumes flat wall from floor to ceiling. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Real dimensions go on the cut list, not nominal ones.