Worktop templating in Canada Water

Yes. Canada Water is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SE16. It is worked on our south east London run, along with the rest of Southwark. Where the bay sits some distance from the core, the carry across the car park is the longest leg of the day and gets boarded and lit. 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.

Estate roads are narrow with parking courts behind the blocks, so the carry crosses open ground rather than a pavement. 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. The whole job is dictated by the service lift booking - one slot, one lift, so the tops get cut into liftable pieces and jointed on site.

Everything goes through a concierge and a booked service lift with a delivery slot, loading bays are timed, and the goods route runs through basement car parks with 2m headroom that a long-wheelbase van clears but a roof-racked slab frame does not. 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. The templater measures that route on the same visit, so the drawing leaves site already knowing the maximum piece. It goes on the drawing with the run dimensions.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop replacement, 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. The junction between the original room and the extension is the point to watch, because the two floors rarely sit at the same height. No stone is ever cut from a plan, which is inconvenient exactly when a programme is tight. Units fitted, fixed and level first. 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. The room as it is, not as it was drawn.

Two parallel runs with a walkway between them is the most efficient shape there is on a slab, because both pieces nest as straight lengths with almost no waste. 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 stone carries the scribe because the wall cannot be persuaded, so back edges are cut oversize and eased in rather than dropped straight down. One measurement never describes it, which is why a tape reading taken before the visit rarely matches the template. Plotted, not estimated. 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. 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. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.