Worktop templating in Camden Town

Yes. Camden Town is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are NW1. It is worked on our central and north London run, along with the rest of Camden. Where the frontage is a clearway the unload happens away from the door and the carry gets longer, which is a crew and time question rather than a stone one. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. Two hours is the realistic figure. We template in your kitchen and fit in your kitchen, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Lease conditions and the other flats in the building decide when noisy work can happen, so the fitting day has a start and a finish that are not ours to set. 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. Expect to plan a join purely to get material up a converted staircase, and check the floor first because conversion floors above a shop or a pub bounce more than you want under 30mm quartz.

The CPZ runs seven days near the markets, the streets around the Lock are pedestrianised or clogged with market traffic until late, and Camden Road and Kentish Town Road are constant bus routes with nowhere to sit a van. Most drops are a shared front door then a turn onto a narrow converted landing, so a 3m slab often cannot be carried flat past the newel post. A walk-up with winders at every half-landing means the piece is rested and re-gripped on the way, so the crew size goes up before the piece size comes down. Door widths, turn diagonals and any change of level are recorded on the drawing alongside the run dimensions. The template records it along with everything else.

It is one of the three we do most here, behind worktop replacement. Same template visit, same workshop, same installers either way. Party-wall and lease conditions in a converted building set when noisy work can happen, which shapes the fitting day more than the kitchen does. 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.

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. 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.

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. The same building type can arrive as a careful one-off kitchen or as a fast turnaround, and the honest answer is that they are priced differently. The templater needs the sink, tap and hob on site, and a Belfast sink installed at its final height. No stone is cut from a plan.