Worktop templating in Bankside

Yes. Bankside is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE1. It is run from the New Malden side, covering South West London & Surrey. Bay bookings are usually an hour or two, which is fine for unloading and no use at all as a place to leave the van for a day. A templater circling for a space arrives late into a slot that was already tight, and the drawing is what suffers. It goes on the job sheet for the fitting crew. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Open-plan living makes the kitchen furniture rather than utility, so the island and the run behind it are nested off the same area of slab. New-build rooms are genuinely square, but they are dot-and-dab plasterboard, and the taped internal angle is where it goes wrong - the board bellies at the corner and the run picks up a few millimetres over the last 300mm. Two to three hours, once the units are in. Waterfall ends and mitred edges mean the fabrication tolerances matter more than the fitting - a 1mm out on the mitre shows on a 900mm drop.

Riverside towers with a single loading bay, booked service lift, protective floor coverings demanded by building management, and no kerbside anywhere near the entrance. The lift has to be booked and blanketed before anything moves, and that booking needs to cover the old tops coming out as well as the new stone going in. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. The laser records it along with everything else. Tell us what the approach looks like when you book the template and it gets built into the day rather than discovered on it.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop fabrication, worktop installation and worktop design & quotation. That is a statement about the local housing rather than about the work. It is quoted, cut and fitted exactly the same way here as anywhere else on the patch. Handover-spec kitchens are square, plumb and predictable, which means the join count is honest and driven by run length rather than by the building. Two to three hours on site, with the sink, tap and hob physically present. The room as it is, not as it was drawn. Housings and integrated appliances are set out for a 38mm laminate top, so dropping to 20mm or 30mm stone changes the clearances and needs checking before anything is cut. The template visit is booked once the units are genuinely in, not when they are nearly in. Appliances on site, not on order.

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. Join positions and vein direction are marked on the template drawing before it leaves site. The drawing leaves site complete. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

A run can measure dead right at both ends and still belly out in the middle, which only appears once the laser plots the intermediate points. It is recorded on the drawing with the run dimensions so the workshop is not guessing. Measured at worktop height, nowhere else. Boards taped or skimmed and finished, units fixed back to the wall and levelled off, and the appliances on site - the wall must be at its final thickness on template day, so no tiler or splashback fitter gets ahead of the worktop. Mixed ownership means the decision-maker is not always the person who lets us in, so it is worth being clear early about who signs the quote off. A template booked hopefully around another trade is the commonest cause of a wasted visit. No stone is cut from a plan.