Worktop fabrication in Hadley Wood

Yes. Hadley Wood is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are EN4. It is run from the Watford side, covering Hertfordshire & North London. A front drive is the best thing that can happen to a fitting day, because the tail lift comes down within a few metres of the door and nothing is on a clock. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. The load plan follows from it. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Original joinery is deep and stands proud of the plaster, so the run is plotted to the units rather than to the wall behind them. The joins here are chosen rather than forced, so they go where the veining and the gables want them. Every join over a gable, clear of every cut-out. The railway bridge and gate widths on the approach roads decide which van can get in, and that needs checking at survey rather than on delivery day.

Private estate roads with gates and a narrow railway bridge on the main approach that limits vehicle height and length, so the delivery vehicle has to be chosen for the route. Driveways are long, gravelled and often sloped. A side gate and a back door mean the stone never goes through the house at all, which keeps the dust and most of the risk outside. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. It is settled on the bench, not on site. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop design & quotation. 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. 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. Rear and side-return extensions are where the islands appear, and an island is the piece that decides whether one slab does the kitchen or two. So the nesting is planned around it rather than around a standard kitchen. Same slab run, or it is not a match.

An island is a single visible piece with four finished edges and no wall to hide against, so it is the piece the whole kitchen is judged on. A join that lands in the wrong place cannot be moved once the cut-outs are machined, so it is settled on the drawing. That is nested before any glass goes on the saw. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a breast interrupts a long wall the join can often go there, so it reads as a natural break rather than a line in the middle of a worktop. Internal corners are machined with a radius and polished, and kept well clear of any join or cut-out. The drawing decides it, not the fitter. The range or Aga, the sink and the tap all need to be confirmed by model before nesting, because their clearances and hole positions set where the island can be cut. 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. The workshop works from the approved drawing, so whoever signs it off is signing off the join positions too. Changes cost a piece, not a tweak.