Worktop fabrication in Wormholt

Yes. Wormholt is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W12. It is worked on our west London run, along with the rest of Hammersmith and Fulham. A free-parking street with cars both sides can still leave the van forty metres away, and that distance is carry, not driving. 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. Both visits happen in your kitchen, the template and the fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

An ex-council house is solidly built to a standard plan, with the kitchen at the rear and a back door next to it. Walls in the system-built blocks are concrete or panel and can bow noticeably over the length of a run, so the template picks up the real line and we cut the back edge to follow it rather than trimming on site with a grinder. A wall that leans is machined to the lean. Floors settle, and once base units are packed and levelled properly the stone sits true while everything else in the room admits it is not. 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 casing gets plotted. The steel inside it does not.

Rear access usually lets us fit longer pieces whole, so the join count ends up decided by the slab rather than by the building. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. The cut list answers to the way in first. Where the van can pull up level with the gate the pieces are handled the fewest times, which is what actually protects them. Pieces are loaded in reverse fitting order so the first thing off the van is the first thing that goes down. A timed unload is planned into the rack before it leaves.

Not particularly. It would be easy to say yes and leave it there. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement and worktop splashbacks & upstands. That is about what people have here rather than how it gets done. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. 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. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Spares crated with the batch and labelled by unit. 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. 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 mitred corner is cut and dressed as a matched pair, and if either leg shifts by a millimetre on site the joint opens along its whole length rather than at one end. The nest is laid out around that, with joins placed over cabinet gables and kept clear of every cut-out. Edge work on a return matches edge work on a length. Reckon on £110 to £550 per square metre for the material supply only, with templating, fabrication and fitting itemised separately.

A junction between an original floor and a later extension slab is almost never at the same level, so units carrying a run across it need packing first. Cut it square where it should be radiused and the piece will fail on the lift, not in the kitchen. The piece is nested around the scribe, not despite it. The stack boxing needs to be in its final form and the sink and hob on site before we machine, since a boxing that gets re-clad afterwards throws the notch out. Planned programmes run several kitchens in sequence, so template, fabrication and fitting move as a rolling operation and one uncollected key holds up more than one flat. Changing an appliance after the nest is set means recutting the piece, not adjusting it. Nothing is cut before the signature comes back.

Chips at an edge or a corner are the usual form, because that is where stone is least supported. Door frames and the stair route are protected too, since most contact happens on the way in. Most breakages happen on the carry, which is why the route is walked and measured before anything comes off the van. Garden routes carry their own hazards: a drain cover, a step up to a patio, wet decking, or a lawn that will not take a loaded trolley. 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.

Bleach and limescale remover harm a polished finish rather than clean it, whichever material is on the units. Granite is porous to varying degrees, so it is sealed when we fit it and topped up over the life of the worktop. Topping a seal up is a wipe-on job with a cloth. Rear access through a garden or a shared path means long pieces can usually come in whole from the back. The notch around a boxed stack is machined with a radius, because a square internal corner there is where a top fails. A century of movement is taken out at the bench.

If the sink or hob changes after the template, the drawing changes first and nothing is cut meanwhile. A boiling tap needs a hole of its own and a cupboard below for the tank, so the units change too. Butt-jointing over the gable puts the seam a few hundred millimetres back from the corner, below the eye line instead of straight across it. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. Offcut sizes are decided before the first cut.

Upstand or splashback, the stone is cut from the same slab run as the worktop, at the same time, so the batch actually matches. An upstand covers the gap where the worktop meets a wall that is not flat, which is its real job. Walls are dense block or in-situ concrete with a bonded plaster, so the bottom course of tiles brings plaster with it when the old top comes off. Short runs nest tightly, so a compact kitchen often comes out of one slab with the upstands taken from its offcuts. Cut-outs are placed where the fabric will take them.