Worktop fabrication in Strand-on-the-Green

Yes. Strand-on-the-Green is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are W4. It is run from the High Wycombe side, covering Buckinghamshire & Berkshire. Off-street parking means the van stays put all day, so tools, packers and the offcut we would rather have than not are all within reach. Where unloading has to happen in one go, the load order is planned so nothing has to come off twice. It is decided in the yard, not at the kerb. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A small room puts the sink, hob and tap cut-outs close together on one short length, and the bridge of stone left between them decides whether it can be cut in one piece. 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. Every join over a gable, clear of every cut-out. Because every piece is hand-carried along the towpath, slabs get broken into shorter sections than you would normally accept and the joints get planned around the carry, not the layout.

The hardest access in the borough. Frontages face a towpath with no vehicle route to the door, so everything is carried from the nearest road, and high tides put flood boards across the way in. A short hard approach with no steps means a full-length piece can be walked in flat by two people rather than turned up on edge. So the nesting is worked to the measured route first and to the slab second. Once the cut-outs are machined there is no going back on it. 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 templating. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. Cutting several kitchens from different slabs and calling them matched is where firms get caught out. Nested for the job in front of us. 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. Same slab run, or it is not a match.

Galley runs are usually short enough to come out of a single slab, so the material band you choose does more to the total than the room shape does. 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.

Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. 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 drawing decides it, not the fitter. 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. Where ownership is split across a building, the common parts belong to someone else and the carry route is negotiated rather than assumed. 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.