Worktop templating in Addiscombe

Yes. Addiscombe is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are CR0. It is worked on our south London run, along with the rest of Croydon. Enforcement zones rarely accept a trade van unloading stone as an exemption, so this gets sorted before the date is confirmed rather than argued about afterwards. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. The templater needs a proper stop, not a pause. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

A long piece has to come through the front door, down the hall, round the newel post and through a doorway with a step down into the addition. Victorian party walls and chimney-breast returns bow along their length, so the template plots the real line rather than assuming a straight one - the template picks up points every few hundred millimetres down the back of the run and the drawing carries that curve through to the saw. Two to three hours, once the units are in. Side-return infills here almost always run longer than 3m, so the joint sits under the tap where it is least visible rather than in the middle of the run.

No off-street parking, permit bays, and no usable side passage once the return is infilled, so slabs go in through the front door before or after the builders have finished the hall floor. Everything comes through the front door and down the hall, so the tightest point on the route is usually the newel post at the foot of the stairs. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. 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. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. Units fitted, fixed and level first. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. The room as it is, not as it was drawn.

Rooflights along a side return mean the worktop is lit from directly above all day, which shows every ripple in a surface and every gap at a scribe. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. One datum for the whole room. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Where a run finishes into a reveal, the depth of that reveal is taken at worktop height and nowhere else. One measurement never describes it, which is why a tape reading taken before the visit rarely matches the template. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. Units fixed and packed level over the sloping floor, walls replastered and dry at their final thickness (tiling and splashbacks go on after the worktop, never before), and the sink, tap and hob physically on site, with a Belfast sink built in and set at its finished height. A street with houses in single occupation next to the same houses cut into flats produces two completely different jobs from the same elevation. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. No stone is cut from a plan.