Worktop templating in Albany Park

Yes. Albany Park is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are DA5, DA14. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Bexley. 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. 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.

Cottage estate houses were built to a small number of standard plans, so the kitchen is compact, roughly square and predictable in the good sense. The typical 1930s kitchen sits at the back with a low window over the sink run, so the template records the exact sill height above the units to settle whether an upstand fits or the stone has to die into a window board. Two to three hours, once the units are in. Because the house types repeat, so do the surprises, the same buried chimney breast and the same sagging back wall in every one.

A uniform grid of wide roads with drives and dropped kerbs on most houses; parking is easy except right around the station at commuter times. The van gets close to the door and the stone comes off the tail lift onto a trolley, which is about the shortest carry we ever get. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. That is part of what the visit is for.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. 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. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Appliances on site, not on order. A new extension slab is not automatically level, and that wants checking before templating rather than after the stone is cut. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. The room as it is, not as it was drawn.

The free end is what needs deciding early: square edge, mitred apron down the end, or a full waterfall to the floor, and a waterfall is cut in sequence off the same part of the slab. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. 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.

The returns into a breast recess are the tightest scribes in the room, and they are eased in rather than forced. It is recorded on the drawing with the run dimensions so the workshop is not guessing. Plotted, not estimated. All base units in, including anything standing on the later extension slab, walls skimmed to final thickness, and the sink, tap and hob delivered so cut-outs and tap centres are set from the actual items. Where someone is living in the house through the work, the strip-out and the fit are planned so the kitchen is out of use for a day and not a week. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. No stone is cut from a plan.