Worktop templating in Earlsfield

Yes. Earlsfield is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are SW18. It is worked on our south west London run, along with the rest of Wandsworth. Permit hours are what matters, not the permit itself, because a bay that frees up at six in the evening is no use for a template at ten. The templating visit needs somewhere to stop for two or three hours, which is a different problem from unloading for twenty minutes. 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.

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. No stone is ever cut from a plan. Side-return roofs here often bring a downpipe or a boiler flue through the new flank wall, so the run gets a notch or a shortened piece that has to be picked up at template, not at fit.

Streets are permit-controlled with narrow carriageways, and the railway embankment and Garratt Lane traffic limit approach routes. Front gardens are shallow, so there is barely a metre to stage a slab before the door. Door width, hall width and the diagonal at the turn are three separate measurements, and it is the diagonal that catches people out. A template taken without walking the route produces a drawing that cuts beautifully and will not go in. The template records it along with everything else.

Yes. On the research for this patch it is the first of the three jobs listed, ahead of worktop installation and worktop replacement. Small kitchens in a shared house are all short runs and tight cut-out spacing, which is more bench work per square metre than one large kitchen would be. 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.

A galley run down a side-return extension usually measures longer than a slab will give in one length, so a join is designed in from the start rather than discovered. The template records every angle in that shape as it actually is rather than as the plan drew it. Real angles, not plan angles. Material is £110-£550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted on their own lines.

Boxing is rarely the same depth at worktop height as it is at floor level, so measuring it low down is the usual reason a top will not sit back. It is recorded on the drawing with the run dimensions so the workshop is not guessing. Plotted, not estimated. 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. Fitted, fixed and level, then we come.