Worktop fabrication in Wimbledon Chase

Yes. Wimbledon Chase is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW20, SW19. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Merton. A visitor or a neighbour parked on the drive is a five-minute problem at eight in the morning and an hour-long one at eleven. 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. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Everything on one level means no stairs, no landings and no turns, which is about the easiest carry there is in domestic work. Most of these have a side passage and a back door, so a full-length piece can usually reach the kitchen without being cut down, and the piece sizing is driven by the slab rather than the route. Settled on the drawing, cut once. The face of a breast is rarely flat, and a top returning onto it picks up that bow across the last few hundred millimetres of its length. The template drawing carries the real geometry through to the saw, and the piece is machined to it rather than trimmed to it later. The notch is machined, never ground in later.

Every internal doorway on the way through is another frame to clear, and internal doors come off their hinges rather than being propped open. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. An access join is dressed to the same standard as any other. 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. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. That is the last thing settled before dispatch.

No, not particularly, and it would be easy to say otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop installation, worktop splashbacks & upstands and worktop replacement. That is the local housing talking rather than anything about the job. It is priced, cut and fitted no differently here than anywhere else we cover. 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. Ten metres of upstand out of what the tops left. 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. Pieces are dry-assembled and checked on the bench before anything is loaded. Spares crated with the batch and labelled by unit.

The advantage of a U is that every join can be put over a gable in a corner, so nothing lands in the middle of a clear length. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The corner is proven on the bench first. The supply-only figure for material runs £110 to £550 per square metre, and templating, fabrication and fitting are lines of their own.

Old breasts carry a bulge low down where the original opening was closed up, and the units stand off it before the stone is measured at all. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. A plan-angle mitre closes on paper only. The peninsula end detail needs deciding up front - square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall - because a waterfall end has to be cut in sequence off the same part of the slab as the top. 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. Changing an appliance after the nest is set means recutting the piece, not adjusting it. Two names on a drawing, one of them decides.

If your own slab breaks there is no matching replacement to hand, and that is the real difference. Delivery to the workshop has to be arranged and dated, since nothing is nested until it is there. Remnants bought elsewhere are the awkward case, because the drawing is then made to fit the stone. An open-plan extension puts the worktop in the middle of the living space, so it is looked at from the sofa as well as worked on. Repeat pieces are cut from one drawing set, so what arrives on the bench is the same every time. Same slab run, or it is not a match.

Upkeep is settled when the slab is chosen, since it belongs to the material rather than the fabrication. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Bungalow kitchens are frequently extended into the rear or opened into the roof space, so the room is part original and part new build. What does drive the bench work is the knocked-through kitchen-diner: the return worktop and any peninsula are seen end-on from the dining side, so we nest the pieces so the veining carries across the internal corner in the same direction rather than turning through ninety degrees. The bench proves it before the van moves.

A remade piece is cut from the same slab run wherever the slab allows, because a replacement from another batch will not match across a join. A piece is never laid flat across a gap while it is moved, because that is how stone cracks unaided. The workmanship guarantee runs 5 years on every kitchen we fit. A pendant light hanging in the middle of a hall ceiling sets the angle a piece can be tilted to, and it is the measurement nobody thinks to take. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The longest piece is capped in the workshop, deliberately.

What you get is a line rather than a step, because the pieces are levelled to each other first. An island often runs in one piece where a wall run cannot. Join count and position are settled from the template drawing rather than improvised on the fitting day. The short run at the head of a U usually sits under a window, so that piece is scribed on three sides at once and has nowhere left to be pushed back to. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Yield is worked on the slab, not on a calculator.