Worktop fabrication in Woolwich Dockyard

Yes. Woolwich Dockyard is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE18. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Greenwich. Where parking runs down both sides the road is left as a single lane, and a van standing in it has to be somewhere it does not stop a bin lorry. It rarely changes what we cut, but it does change how the pieces are stacked and strapped for the run out. Stacking order is a parking decision here. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Many have had the ground floor chimney breast removed to gain three hundred millimetres, and the gained strip is newer blockwork standing proud of the old 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. Nothing is machined square because a plan says square. Anything that has to stay accessible, a stopcock, a gas meter, a riser panel, is marked on the template so the stone is cut around it instead of over it. 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 relief that deep changes how the piece is lifted.

A short run of external steps before the communal door means a piece is lifted twice before the staircase proper has even started. Getting that wrong leaves a finished, machined piece that cannot reach the room, which is a remake rather than a trim. The drawing carries that decision through to the saw. With no scheme to work with there is nothing to book and nobody to ring, so the only levers left are an early arrival and a word with the neighbours. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The van is packed to suit the walk at the other end.

One of the three we are asked for most, although worktop replacement is asked for more. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. 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. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Spares crated with the batch and labelled by unit. 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. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Same slab run, or it is not a match.

A galley puts the sink on one side and the hob on the other, which spreads the cut-outs across two pieces instead of weakening one. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. The return is nested first, because it fits worst. Material runs £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting each get their own line.

A notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius at the internal corner, because a square inside corner there is exactly where a top will crack. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. Cut to the plotted line, not the nominal one. 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. Consent for the work sits with the freeholder or the managing body, and getting it in writing first avoids a crew arriving to a locked door. 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.

Packing takes up small variation. It is not there to hide something that belongs in the units. Where a run meets an appliance, level decides whether that appliance door still clears the stone above it. If the carcasses are corrected, the template is taken again, since a drawing off units that then moved is worthless. A live soil stack cannot be chased back into the wall, so the depth it steals is permanent and the run is planned around it rather than through it. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The mitre is cut to the angle we found, not to ninety.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. No maintenance visit is built into the job. Soap, water, and on the porous stones a seal. Where a top takes wine, oil and lemon most days, the non-porous materials ask least of the household. The staircase rises over the back room in a good number of these, so a sloping bulkhead sits over one end of the run and a piece cannot be stood on edge beneath it. 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. The shell decides the piece; the slab decides only the yield.

Nothing is measured until the sink, the tap and the hob are in the room to measure against. The template is taken in your kitchen after the units are in and fixed, never before. The design and quotation visit comes first. It is free and carries no obligation. Lower ground floor kitchens are reached by a stair with a winder in it, and the head height over that winder is lower than the room at either end. All of that is settled at the nesting stage, because a machined piece cannot be adjusted afterwards. Yield is worked out against the run lengths the house allows.

Every piece goes in by hand and stone does not bend, so the tightest turn on the route sets the longest piece. What decides it is not the width of the stairwell but the length of piece that can be turned in it. The measurement that decides everything is the diagonal between the underside of the flight above and the outer edge of the turn below it. The maximum piece length is fixed at drawing stage and every join is placed over a cabinet gable from there. It is settled on the bench, not on site.